www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,936744,00.html

"Break up the Joint Chiefs"

Monday, Dec. 23, 1957

As Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (1945-48), five-star General Dwight Eisenhower was one of the chief architects of the National Security Act of 1947, which set up the separate U.S. Air Force and was also designed-though with numerous compromises-to "unify" the armed services. As President of the U.S., Dwight Eisenhower has a better basic knowledge of how the services work than any President in modern history. Yet, paradoxically, one of the soft spots of his Administration record is that, during the regime of Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, Ike let Pentagon administration get out of hand.

At his conference with legislative leaders last fortnight the President sat fuming while Congressmen asked sharp questions-and got limp answers from Pentagon officials-about interservice rivalries, overlapping missile programs and the whole organizational foul-up that makes it almost impossible to trace responsibility for any kind of failure in U.S. defense. No sooner had the congressional leaders left the White House than President Eisenhower called Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, into his office. His orders: find the right answers to the Pentagon's problems and put them into effect. Said the President: "You have a free hand."

More & Better.

It was not all that simple: before Neil McElroy could attack the Pentagon's problems he had first to know and understand them himself. And the same organizational tangle that brought on Ike's order is still working against McElroy-or his three subordinate service secretaries, or the 30 assistant and deputy secretaries-achieving the required knowledge and understanding. Never has that fact been more bluntly put than last week, when the Army's tough, brainy research and development chief, Lieut. General James M. Gavin, appeared before the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee.

Neil McElroy, said Paratrooper Gavin pointedly, is "the most able man who has come to that office [Secretary of Defense]." But McElroy needs more and better "professional military advice" than he has been able to get under the Pentagon system from the Joint Chiefs of Staff -or from assistant secretaries whose regimes, said Gavin, have lasted "somewhat on the order of a year and a half."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff is a sort of command-by-committee system (Gavin later emphasized that he was not talking about the individual competence of the present chiefs) and is not enough. Said Jim Gavin: "He [McElroy] needs more advice than the Joint Chiefs of Staff give him. I think really what is needed now is a competent military staff of senior military people working directly for the Secretary of Defense. I would have them take over the functions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I would have the military staff organized to handle operations, plans, intelligence, and in fact break up the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Such a career staff, said General Gavin, should be drawn from all services, but should be "completely integrated across the board." Said Gavin: "The thing that disturbs a number of people, and I am included, is that there is no operational staff within the Department of Defense, and in the event of war it would have to be reorganized."

(2 of 2)

First Things First.

At no point did Gavin actually advocate a "general staff system"-which conjures up images of Prussianism to many a skittish Congressman-and to all devout Navymen. But that was precisely what he was urging, just as retired Air Force General James Doolittle had urged a fortnight before when appearing before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. In the minds of Jim Gavin and Jimmy Doolittle, and in the opinion of others among the nation's best military thinkers, Neil McElroy cannot even begin to solve the Pentagon's problems until he has a general staff, whatever it may be called. Their argument: only a general staff, standing above violent service loyalties and ambitions, can work out a single, integrated, sensible U.S. defense plan. And only within the context of a single, integrated, sensible defense plan can Neil McElroy start using his free hand to tackle the subsidiary problems. Among them:

ROLES & MISSIONS.

If he is to head off an interservice blow-up that will make past squabbles seem like mere brush fires, McElroy must redefine obsolescent service roles and missions assignments (air to the Air Force, sea control to the Navy, land to the Army) in the light of missile strategy, to which old geographic concepts no longer apply. Outer space, by present definitions, belongs to no single service; neither does defense against enemy space missiles. Neither, for that matter, does the missile itself. All the services are rushing in with proposals, claims, bids.

ADMINISTRATION.

The Defense Department must find a way to become an operational as well as a policymaking body in such grey areas as missile development. McElroy has promised a single manager for new space programs. Another critical problem is the increasing demand for an effective missile "czar," since neither Missile Director William Holaday nor Presidential Science Adviser James Killian has yet fulfilled that role.

EXPENDITURES.

McElroy's predecessor, Charlie Wilson, let costs get so far out of hand that he was forced to call an abrupt halt to military procurement before the end of fiscal 1957. He also had to reduce procurement programs for 1958 to an extent that caused havoc in the airframe industry. McElroy will probably have about $2 billion more than Wilson to spend, will have that much bigger a problem in trying to control the spending.

LIMITED WAR v. GENERAL WAR.

During Wilson's regime, big-war thinking dominated U.S. military policy and procurements. But there is a rising clamor for the U.S. to prepare itself equally for small, limited wars; the Army especially is driving hard for the men and equipment, including airplanes; is already on the way to having an air force of its own.

In his brief time in office, Neil McElroy has indicated that he may be a strong Defense Secretary. He will have to be: his is the awesome job of making up for past mistakes while presiding over the orderly and economical phasing-in of an entire new military technology, without weakening U.S. forces in being.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,867921,00.html

"A Real Big Brawl"

Monday, Nov. 11, 1957

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).

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Short-Range Army Honest John Unguided Rocket

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpJeyiDLPXA

The MGR-1 Honest John rocket was the first nuclear-capable surface-to-surface rocket in the US arsenal. Designated Artillery Rocket XM31, the first such rocket was tested in 1951 and deployed in January 1953. The designator was changed to M31 in September, 1953 and were deployed in Europe several months later. It is important to note that alternatively, the rocket was designed to be capable of carrying ordinary high-explosive warheads, even though that was not the primary purpose for which it was envisioned since it lacked guidance accuracy to make small warheads effective.

The M31 consisted of a truck-mounted, unguided, solid-fueled rocket transported in 3 separate parts. Before launch they were combined in the field, mounted on an M289 launcher and aimed and fired in about 5 minutes. The rocket was originally outfitted with a W7 dial-a-yield nuclear warhead with a yield of up to 20 kilotons and later a W31 warhead with a yield of up to 40 kt. It had a range between 5.5 km (3.4 miles) and 24.8 km (15.4 miles).

In the 1960s Sarin nerve gas cluster munitions were also available for Honest John launch.

There were 2 versions: * MGR-1A had a range of 48 kilometers, takeoff thrust of 400 kN, takeoff weight of 2720 kg, diameter of 580 mm and length of 8.32 m. * MGR-1B had a range of 37 kilometers, launch thrust of 382 kN, launch weight of 2040 kg, diameter of 760 mm and length of 7.56 m.

Production of the MGR-1 variants finished in 1965 with a total production run of more than 7,000 rockets. The system was replaced with the MGM-52 Lance missile in 1973, but was deployed with NATO units in Europe and U.S. Army National Guard units as late as 1982.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1GF2kii9Hk

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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."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULeMVjbsKb8

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.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825005,00.html

Let the Army ...

Monday, Jun. 24, 1957

The failure of the first Air Force test Atlas gave underdog Army spokesmen new confidence in the bitter interservice fracas on U.S. missile dominance. Against Atlas's crash and the Air Force's bug-ridden 1,500-mile Thor missile, the Army touted its own relatively successful 1,500-mile Jupiter (TIME, June 10) and the new low-level-surface-to-air Hawk, made its boldest pitch yet for operational control of intermediate-range missilery (1,500 miles) now assigned to the Air Force.

Hawk SAM on all-terrain tracked carrier

Chief architect of the new approach is tough Lieut. General James M. Gavin, Army Research and Development boss, who before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee last week flung a basic reverse-twist challenge to Air Force doctrine: "In the missile era, the man who controls the land will control the space above it. The control of land areas [rather than air] will be decisive." In effect, ex-Paratrooper Gavin was arguing that the Army, instead of the Air Force, should be assigned to the area defense (as well as point defense) of the U.S. against Soviet ICBM attack. The Army, said Gavin, is better oriented for the air-defense job of the future: "We want 100% air defense and we consider this attainable. There has been no schizophrenia in the Army about how to get an air defense. We haven't worried about [jet] interceptors. We have gone after missiles . . . Very little, if anything, is going to get through us."

U.S. Army got America into Space, NOT NASA: First American Satellite in Orbit but could have beat the Russians had DoD Not Interfered, Army rockets put first American astronauts into space

www.redstone.army.mil/history/systems/redstone/welcome.html

On 10 July 1951, the Office, Chief of Ordnance (OCO) formally transferred research and development responsibility for the REDSTONE project to Redstone Arsenal. The OCO officially assigned the REDSTONE missile its name on 8 April 1952. Also known as the Army's "Old Reliable," the REDSTONE was a highly accurate, liquid propelled, surface-to-surface missile capable of transporting nuclear or conventional warheads against targets at ranges up to approximately 200 miles. First deployed in 1958, the REDSTONE was the forerunner of the JUPITER missile. On 31 January 1958, the REDSTONE was used as the first stage in the launch vehicle used by the Army to orbit the EXPLORER I, the Free World's first scientific earth satellite. A modified REDSTONE carried CDR Alan B. Shepard, Jr. on his historic suborbital flight on 5 May 1961.

PROJECT "Mercury 7" Astronauts at Redstone Arsenal Meeting before Launches

With the deployment of the speedier, more mobile [smaller, solid-fuel] PERSHING missile system in 1964, the REDSTONE missile system was ceremonially retired at Redstone Arsenal on 30 October 1964.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7YABPisFGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ba2KS3_FY0

Pershing was a family of solid-fueled two-stage medium-range ballistic missiles designed and built by Martin Marietta to replace the Redstone missile as the United States Army's primary theater-level weapon. It was named for General of the Armies (6-Stars) John J. Pershing. The systems were managed by the U.S. Army Missile Command (MICOM) and deployed by the United States Army Field Artillery Corps.

Pershing IA

In 1964, a series of operational tests and follow-on tests were performed to determine the reliability of the Pershing 1. The Secretary of Defense then requested that the Army define the modifications required to make Pershing suitable for the quick reaction alert (QRA) role. The Pershing 1A development program was approved in 1965, and the original Pershing was renamed to Pershing I. Martin Marietta received the Pershing 1A production contract in mid-1967. The 2^nd Battalion, 44^th Field Artillery received equipment at Fort Sill in 1969. Project SWAP replaced all of the Pershing equipment in Germany by mid-1970 and the first units quickly achieved QRA status.

Pershing 1A was a "quick reaction alert" system and so had faster vehicles, launch times and newer electronics. The total number of launchers was increased from eight to 36 per battalion. It was deployed from May 1969 and by 1970 almost all the Pershing I systems had been upgraded to Pershing IA under Project SWAP. Production of the Pershing IA ended in 1975 and reopened in 1977 to replace missiles expended in training. In the mid-1970s the Pershing 1A system was further improved to allow the firing of a platoon's three missiles in quick succession and from any site without the need for surveying. 754 Pershing I/IA missiles were built with 180 deployed in Europe.[8]

The battalions in Europe were reorganized under new tables of organization and equipment (TOE); an infantry battalion was authorized and formed to provide additional security for the system; and, the 56^th Artillery Group was reorganized and redesignated the 56^th Field Artillery Brigade. Due to the nature of the weapon system, officer positions were increased by one grade: batteries were commanded by a major instead of a captain; battalions were commanded by a colonel and the brigade was commanded by a brigadier general.

The erector launcher (EL) was a modified low-boy flat-bed trailer towed by a Ford M757 5-ton tractor. The erection booms used a 3,000 psi pneumatic over hydraulic system that could erect the 5 ton missile from horizontal to vertical in nine seconds. The PTS and PS were mounted on a Ford M656 tractor. Launch activation was performed from a remote fire box that could be deployed locally or mounted in the battery control central (BCC). One PTS controlled three launchers-- when one launch count was complete, ten large cables were moved to the next launcher.

A repackaging effort of the missile and power station was completed in 1974 to provide easier access to missile components, reduce maintenance, and improve reliability. A new digital guidance and control computer combined the functions of the analog control computer and the analog guidance computer into one package. The mean corrective maintenance time was decreased from 8.7 hours to a requirement of 3.8 hours. The reliability increased from 32 hours mean time between failures to a requirement of 65 hours. In 1976, the sequential launch adapter (SLA) and the automatic reference system (ARS) were introduced. The SLA was an automatic switching device mounted in a 10 trailer that allowed the PTS to remain connected to all three launchers. This allowed all three launchers to remain "hot" and greatly decreasing the time between launches. The ARS eliminated the theodolites previously used to lay and orient the missile. It included a north seeking gyro and a laser link to the ST-120 in the missile. Once the ARS was set up, a cold missile could be oriented in a much shorter time.

MILESTONES

20 November '44 Ordnance Department entered into a research and development contract with the General Electric Company for study and development of long-range missiles that could be used against ground targets and high-altitude aircraft. This was the beginning of the HERMES project.

June '46 General Electric began a feasibility study of the HERMES Cl which later formed the basis for early REDSTONE missile research.

1 June 49 Redstone Arsenal was reactivated from standby status as the site of the Ordnance Rocket Center.

28 October '49 The Secretary of the Army approved the transfer of the Ordnance Research and Development Division, Sub-Office (Rocket) at Fort Bliss, Texas, to Redstone Arsenal. Among those transferred were Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists and technicians who had come to the United States under "Operation Paperclip" during 1945 and 1946.

15 April '50 After its transfer to Redstone Arsenal, the aforementioned sub-office was redesignated the Ordnance Guided Missile Center.

10 July '50 Office, Chief of Ordnance directed that the Ordnance Guided Missile Center conduct a preliminary study of the technical requirements and possibilities of developing a 500-mile tactical missile that would be used principally in providing support for the operations of the Army Field Forces. 11 September 50 Ordnance Department directed that the HERMES contract with General Electric Company be amended to transfer responsibility for the HERMES Cl project to the Ordnance Guided Missile Center.

10 July '51 The Office, Chief of Ordnance formally transferred the responsibility for conducting the research and development phase of the HERMES Cl project to Redstone Arsenal

1 April '52 The Office, Chief of Ordnance (OCO) disapproved Redstone Arsenal's proposed development plan for what would become the REDSTONE missile. The arsenal had intended to implement the manufacturing program for these missiles by creating an assembly line in its own development shops. The OCO, however, required that the development effort be done by a prime contractor. Nonetheless, delays in the acquisition of production facilities for the prime contractor caused Redstone Arsenal to fabricate and assemble the first 12 REDSTONE missiles along with missiles 18 through 29.

8 April '52 The REDSTONE missile system officially received its popular name. Previously, this missile was known at various times and places as the HERMES Cl, MAJOR, URSA, XSSM-G-14, and XSSM-A-14.

October '52 Chrysler Corporation issued a letter order contract to proceed with active work as the prime contractor on the REDSTONE missile system. This contract was definitized on 19 June 53.

20 August '53 The first REDSTONE research and development missile was flight tested.

15 June '55 Chrysler Corporation received the first industrial contract for the REDSTONE.

1 February '56 Responsibility for prosecuting the REDSTONE program was transferred from Redstone Arsenal to the newly activated Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA).

15 April '56 The first REDSTONE missile battalion, the 217th Field Artillery Missile Battalion, was formally activated at Redstone Arsenal.

19 July '56 The first REDSTONE missile to be fabricated and assembled by Chrysler Corporation was flight tested.

20 September '56 JUPITER-C Missile RS-27, a modified REDSTONE, achieved the first deep penetration of space with an altitude of more than 680 miles and a range of over 3,300 miles.

8 August '57 JUPITER-C Missile RS-40 a modified REDSTONE, was successfully launched. Its nose cone was the first to be recovered from outer space. The nose cone carried the first missile mail ever delivered over intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) range.

9 September '57 The 40th Field Artillery Missile Group, the first heavy missile group organized in the U.S. Army, was transferred from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Redstone Arsenal.

2 October '57 The first REDSTONE missile firing in which troops actually participated occurred.

4 October '57 The U.S.S.R. launched SPUTNIK I.

8 November '57 The Secretary of Defense directed that DA modify two JUPITER-C missiles (modified REDSTONEs) and attempt to place an artificial earth satellite in orbit by March 58.

31 January '58 ABMA successfully launched JUPITER-C Missile RS-29, a modified REDSTONE, which placed EXPLORER I--the first U.S. satellite--into earth orbit.

16 May '58 The first successful troop launching of a tactical REDSTONE missile occurred at Cape Canaveral , Florida.

June '58 The REDSTONE became the first large U.S. ballistic missile to be deployed overseas, joining the NATO Shield Force.

2 June '58 The first overland firing of a large U.S. ballistic missile by combat troops occurred. A REDSTONE was successfully launched by the 40th Field Artillery Missile Group (Heavy) at White Sands Missile Range.

31 July '58 A REDSTONE missile was fired to an altitude in excess of 200,000 feet and a nuclear device of a megaton was detonated. This was the first such accomplishment by the United States.

24 October '58 The REDSTONE underwent static firing at White Sands Missile Range, the first time such a test had been conducted there.

November '58 The last REDSTONE research and development missile was flight tested. Of the 37 missiles flight tested for research and development purposes, 27 were successfully launched.

16 January '59 NASA issued a request to ABMA for eight REDSTONE missiles to be used in PROJECT MERCURY.

15 March '60 A REDSTONE missile successfully fired from White Sands Missile Range lofted a "flying TV station" for the first time.

10 June '60 The REDSTONE missile was launched over the largest trajectory ever attempted over land (120 miles).

19 December '60 MERCURY-REDSTONE 1 (MR-1) was successfully launched, proving the system's operational capabilities in a space environment.

31 January '61 The second MERCURY-REDSTONE (MR-2) test flight carried a chimpanzee named Ham into space.

5 May '61 MERCURY-REDSTONE 3 (MR-3) carried Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., on his historic suborbital flight.

21 July '61 The last MERCURY-REDSTONE flight carried Captain Virgil I. Grissom to a peak altitude of 118 miles and safely landed him 303 miles downrange.

25 June '64 The REDSTONE missile was classified as obsolete.

30 October 64 In a ceremony on the parade field at Redstone Arsenal, the REDSTONE missile was ceremonially retired.

December '64 The initial REDSTONE production contract awarded to Chrysler in October 52 was closed out.

www.redstone.army.mil/history/explorer/explorer.html

Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency revealed in a speech at the Army Science Symposium at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, during July 1957 that practically all components necessary for a successful satellite launch were available at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. These components, he said, were left from the earlier Project Orbiter and were also available from the Jupiter-C reentry test vehicle program. He also indicated that the Army Ballistic Missile Agency had an orbit evaluation program, first projected by the Guided Missile Development Division in 1954. It consisted of a computer program that would provide scientific data on the oblateness of the earth, on the density of the upper atmosphere, and on high altitude ionization.

Among other things Dr. Stuhlinger noted in his speech was his observation that the 300-pound payload of the Jupiter-C reentry test vehicle missile could be converted to a fourth rocket stage plus an artificial earth satellite. In stating that the projected program had also included studies on high atmospheric conditions, on ionized layers of great altitudes, on the lifetime of satellites, on the earth's field of gravity, on mathematical studies of orbiting satellites, on recovery gear, on protective coverings for nose cones, and on radio-tracking and telemetering equipment (such as the highly sensitive micro-lock, a small continuous wave-radio transmitter developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories for Project Orbiter), Dr. Stuhlinger added strength to the rumors, rife at that time, that the Department of the Army was engaged in an unauthorized satellite project. Because of these rumors, the Secretary of Defense ordered the Department of the Army to refrain from any space activity. Following this, the Department reaffirmed its close cooperation with Project Vanguard and denied that any of its research programs interfered with the intended tactical uses of the Redstone.

Then, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I on 4 October 1957. A month later, the Soviet Union orbited a second, larger satellite. In this country, Project Vanguard faltered when it experienced repeated failures- The Secretary of the Army then submitted a proposal for a satellite program to the Secretary of Defense [Wilson] during October. He pointed out that eight Jupiter-C missiles were available and with slight modification would be capable of launching artificial satellites. He suggested that the Department of the Army be authorized to pursue a 3-phase satellite program using these Jupiter-C missiles. The first phase of the proposed program provided for launching two Jupiter-C missiles in which the nose cone would be replaced by a fourth stage containing instrumentation that would be packaged in a cylindrical container-the satellite. In the second phase of the proposed program, the Army would launch five of the Jupiter-C missiles that would orbit satellites equipped with television facilities. The third and last phase of the proposed program also involved the launching of a Jupiter-C. In it, the nose cone would be replaced by a 300-pound surveillance satellite.

On 8 November 1957, the Secretary of Defense directed the Department of the Army to modify two Jupiter-C missiles and to attempt to place an artificial earth satellite in orbit by March 1958.

And it was the U.S. ARMY's IRBMs that were deployed first overseas with nuclear-warheads to smother any idea of the Soviets invading and taking over Europe. It was U.S. ARMY Jupiter IRBMs that deployed to Turkey and Italy (in stupid fixed sites by the moronic pampered USAF instead of the tactically sound mobile means designed by the Army) that were there as bargaining chips to get the Soviets to back down and take their IRBMs out of Cuba, preventing the world from being drawn into World War III.

Had it not been for the U.S. ARMY been ready in both conventional and nuclear forces despite the efforts of Secretary of Defense Wilson and Ike's disastrous "New Look" policies, we would have not just lost Korea, we would have had only USAF massive retaliation nuclear bombers to counter Soviet aggression, and if used we probably wouldn't even be here today.

Two months after retiring as the U.S. Army's Director on Research and Development, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin delivered his own atomic bombshell in response to setbacks in Korea, Hungary and the Soviets beating us into space with the Sputnik satellites; the masterpiece War & Peace in the Space Age. Mrs. Jean Gavin tells me that he dropped everything else he was doing in early 1958 and wrote the book from sun up to sun down, as a devoted Army wife she finally got to a chance to work on her golf game. Frustrated that America's defense was being thwarted by institutionalized complacency, General Gavin had had enough of suffering in silence and decided it was time to blow-the-whistle with an immediate after action review (AAR) on the battles going on within the newly formed but flawed Department of Defense (DoD) in order to save the day and find a way to win. This was the trademark of Gavin all through his life as a situational leader--- fighting for his family, his Paratroopers, his army and his citizens; a struggle to assess the situation and meet immediate demands, then learning how to get ahead and stay ahead by daring to change the situation and stack-the-deck in our favor.

Historical Significance

Without Gavin's book, America's post-WW2 defense establishment cannot be understood.

Gavin was there when DoD was born in 1947 and fought for its first decade to not fall into a defeatist, institutionalized rut that its still in today. We got lucky because the Soviet Union imploded economically in 1989, but that luck was engineered because just enough of Gavin's ideas were adopted after he had left the scene to prevent a take-over of Europe---of course no credit was given to him for this since he dared reveal the Pentagon's "dirty laundry" to the light of public scrutiny. Gavin's unselfishness to do what it took to force DoD to change was a gamble that saved America and the free world but at the cost of him becoming Secretary of Defense. The book is a blueprint for reforming DoD and was an obvious prima facie case for Gavin to be the next administration's SecDef to reform that organization into what is should be and still needs to be.

Gavin reveals the startling revelation that the U.S. Army had wanted to and had the ability to launch the first satellite into space long before the Russians did it but DoD civilian mandarins and the ruling U.S. Navy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not want the Army to get the money and the glory so America as a whole suffered a severe strategic defeat. When America finally did put a satellite into orbit, it was on an Army rocket. When it put a man into space, it was on an Army rocket. The U.S. Army created America's ballistic missiles yet DoD ran by the USAF mafia took this role/mission away and gave the fruit of the Army's labor to the USAF when they finally admitted their manned heavy bombers might not get through to reach the Soviet Union in an all-out nuclear war. John S. Brown writes in the September 2006 issue of Army magazine:

"Revolts" against civilian superiors by generals and admirals have been infrequent, and rarely have gone well or accomplished much. An exception lies in the resignations of Generals Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin to protest the Eisenhower administration's "New look," which threatened to gut the Army and rely upon strategic weapons alone to keep the peace. Each of these three wrote a thoughtful book-Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway; The Uncertain Trumpet; and War and Peace in the Space Age, respectively-outlining their visions of what the defense paradigm should look like. Collectively considered, these became the basis for the full spectrum "flexible response" that served us so well through the rest of the Cold War.

"Flexible Response" to prevent Eisenhower/Nixon republican disasters after Korea, namely Indochina, Suez, Hungary, Lebanon, Quemoy, Tibet and Laos based on a non-working nuclear doomsday deterrent propelled JFK to the White House. General Taylor became his confidant and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but Ridgway remained in retirement.

Gavin Paid a Heavy Price for Writing the Book

Why didn't President John F. Kennedy appoint Gavin to be SecDef but instead made him Ambassador to France?

The answer, I believe is this book scared many influential people with its many sound but drastic ideas, threatening their military, industrial, congressional and think-tank (MICC-TT) rackets. If Gavin were SecDef, he'd turn the Pentagon around from a bloated, financially wasteful boondoggle back into a lean, efficient and effective Department of War---and this scared the socks off an America weary of the sacrifices of WW2 and who wanted to get back to the suburbs with the G.I. educational bill, work and making babies. The air force's siren's song was (and still is) that if America just paid for big, heavy bombers that could drop nuclear weapons on the enemy's civilian cities (allegedly "Strategic" Bombing), we'd scare all potential enemies to leave the baby boomers alone by this threat of mutually assured suicide. All the monies saved by not having to pay for amies and navies--just air forces---could go instead to paving inter-state highways, shopping malls and schools for the suburbanites. The problem is that don't-attack-or-else-I-will commit-suicide is an empty bluff as we surely would not kill ourselves for other countries and it doesn't stop the enemy from attacking with non-nuclear means as the "asymmetric" aggressions on South Korea in 1950 and Hungary in 1956 proved. Gavin's first sin was to call for more expenditures to field a flexible, small wars force to fight these "limited" wars when the MICC-TT racketeers only wanted to waste billions on "general wars" aka mythical WWIIIs that would be somehow prevented by threat of East-West national suicides. DoD wanted to spend, spend and spend on its mythological wars while ignoring the actual wars raging in the present. Does this sound vaguely familiar?

In 20-20 hindsight, what spoiled Gavin's chances for SecDef more than even daring to spend monies on the army and navy for small wars less than WWIII, was the "N" word---NUCLEAR.

People are scared to death of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear = death = certainly.

Ending of the 1965 movie, Dr. Strangelove

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gb0mxcpPOU

In contrast, Gavin, the great humanitarian, first wants wars to take place on BATTLEFIELDS not against civilians in cities. Next, to close-the-door to Soviet asymmetric attacks exploiting our unreadiness to fight on battlefields he sees small, air burst nuclear weapons as the certainty-of-death provider that coupled with early guidance means can even the odds in our favor if the communists---who can crack the whip on their population gang up on the west with superior numbers of men, tanks, airplanes and ships. If all possible doors of aggression are closed, Gavin instructs us that this means tactical violence can be avoided, we can attain our goals by not fighting which is the aim of sound STRATEGY. To do this, Gavin wants small, tactical nukes on everything; nuclear surface-to-air missiles to clear the skies of Soviet aircraft and incoming ballistic missiles, nuclear bazookas to wipe out Soviet tank formations, mobile, nuclear ballistic missiles to demolish their command and control, supplies and reserves and to even drop into the water to erase missile-firing submarines threatening the American homeland. He wants small nukes to be the "kentucky windage" to take up the slack for any missile guidance imprecision to get a sure effect, and in terms of anti-ballistic missile defense it still is the only "Star Wars" defense that we know will work, the American public was and still is not willing to accept the radiation to avoid blast and heat deaths. This is simply too many nukes in too many places for the American public to accept however desirable from a military point of view, so Gavin was too radical in the eyes of the JFK administration that wanted to bean count with Harvard Business theory men like Robert MacNamara, and we all know the disaster this brought on a few years later in Vietnam.

As Gavin left the service, small, mobile tactical nuclear ballistic missiles were indeed fielded by the U.S. Army into Europe and many have come to the conclusion that these were the things that actually prevented the Soviets from swarming through Fulda Gap; vindicating his vision just enough and long enough for the wall to go down.

Book Not Understood

The next question is, why was this booked ignored by the general public though highly influential in the inner circles of the Pentagon and the Washington beltway?

How many ideas (concepts) can you hold in your head at one time?

The majority of the human beings in the world are LINEAR, thinkers. They can only hold 1 idea in their head at any time and this makes them easily steered by the unscrupulous to do their bidding. Not thinking and having blinders on, brings on a certain type of complacent comfort even if it means certain death arriving after living an unfulfilled life. At the time of Gavin's youth, President Teddy Roosevelt saw this coming and secured major American land areas from urbanization in order to challenge ourselves so machines are misdirected into subsidizing too much comfort and convenience.

Gavin, a man who welcomed challenges, who welcomed problems---could hold many ideas in his head at the same time as a NON-LINEAR thinker. A problem that defies an easy, singular solution that requires multiple solutions does not depress Gavin, he wades into the situation and starts shooting "bad guys" with innovative means, assembling a PATTERN for success. Clearly, Gavin had read British General Francis Tucker's book, The Pattern of War and adopted his concept that wars can be seen as having distinct personalities if one can stand back and objectively fathom the many ideas at work and sort them out. War and Peace in the Space Age is clearly Gavin sorting out for the reader the current and future pattern of war---IF---and this is a big IF---the reader can keep several ideas in his head simultaneously. If he cannot, the book will scare the living feces out of him or her. Too complicated and too terrifying. Gavin realizes that war has indeed gotten far too complex and points out that having civilians without ANY military experience running DoD is a fatal error and events since 1958 grow in tragic intensity highlighting this systemic disease that must be corrected.

One way the linear dismiss the book is by wrongly concluding that its "dated" because Gavin uses nuclear weapons on many of his innovative war means and the book's title "Space Age" is too happy 1950s-ish. The facts are that Gavin only uses nukes to compensate for early guidance means lacking pinpoint impact into their targets, a situation not true today thanks to microprocessor chips (computers). Every time you read the word "nuclear" in Gavin's book, replace it with "precision guided warhead" unless some large area explosive effect is needed and you will quickly see that his book is spot-on in relevancy and prescient in its dire warnings for today and in the future. This concept book should be re-printed perhaps with a new title, "War and Peace in the Guided Missile Age" and made required reading for every officer and NCO in the U.S. military.

To my surprise, the book after the initial warning morphs into a mini-autobiography where Gavin reveals how he came to be the over-achieving and unsung superhero of the 20th century, working behind the scenes on our behalf. War and Peace in the Space Age is actually an autobiography-concept book.

Part 1 Autobiography: The Man

Gavin gets it. The enemy is death and death is hastened by COMPLACENCY. If you stay still, you stop growing. You stop, you die. True in life as in war. To live you have to keep moving, to keep growing and challenging yourself. Born in 1907 to two Irish-American parents who had just gambled everything to come over from Europe, he was orphaned at the age of two. The pioneer spirit of his parents was not in vain, as he was adopted by the Gavin Irish-American family in Pennsylvania. However, as he grew up in a harsh and strict environment he soon learned that America in the 1910s had stopped expanding westward and in his area had settled into a deadly complacency mining coal. The lack of mobility in thought and life from the crowded cities of the old world of Europe had returned. Gavin fought against it even at an early age. He sold newspapers everywhere and anywhere, he worked at a barbershop, he ran a gas station when the industrial age brought on the automobile. On his time off, Gavin marched himself over the next mountain to see what the countryside of his part of the earth offered in natural beauty. He finds books in an old church and reads every one. Yet, filled with all of these possibilities, when he returned on foot back to his coal-mining town, he simply could not get ahead within the narrow parameters there to improve the lot of his family or even get a high school education past grade school. In an amazing act of wisdom and courage, Gavin realized at 17 years old that no amount of stay-in-your-lane struggle (what we call "FIDO" in the Army) would achieve victory and decided like his parents to risk it all and move to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket to find and if necessary make a winning situation, to Get It and Drive On (GIDO).

Saving the Gavins

First thing Gavin does in New York is to illegally enlist under-age into the Army. This is an important case illustrating how society can set up rackets which outsiders cannot win. Underage, Gavin would need his step parent's permission to join the Army and he candidly reveals that they would not support him in this with a mere signature because it would mean tacit admission that their complacent lifestyle in coal country was lacking. Don't get me wrong, America needs coal. However, it doesn't need coal at the cost of destroying the lives of the miners needed to get it. You could say Gavin should have waited another year til he was 18, but to say this would to show a lack of empathy and understanding for people locked into no-win situations. That's not how the human spirit and life works. There is no guarantee that in a year Gavin would have still had the courage or opportunity to reinvent himself by fleeing to New York City. You could say, "of course Gavin would have had the courage a year later". You will read later, that even the always battling-against-the-odds, Gavin can "run out of gas". During the tests for Admission into West Point, he couldn't remember any Shakespeare plays and turned in a blank essay. An unsung hero gave him a break, Lieutenant Black conducting the test ordered him to go back and write something which Gavin did and it was just enough to get him appointed to the U.S. Military Academy. Who is to say that if Gavin did not get into West Point that he wouldn't have reached the end of his rope and gone back to his coal mining home town or some other walk of life and how many men would have died because of it? Gavin reminds me very much of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey in the great post-WW2 1946 movie, "Its a Wonderful Life", except for his greatest common denominator effect to come to pass, he has to go into the service like Bailey's brother does in the story. Also notice I said opportunity---who is to say, the lonely and unloved orphan wouldn't have fell in love with a girl, married and got her pregnant, locking him into fatherhood and immediate financial demands? My mom was an orphan and all her life it affected her ability to love and be loved. To be abandoned by your parents or by world circumstance is and incredibly demoralizing start in the world that requires immense personal courage to overcome.

The lesson to learn here for America today is that EVERY high school graduate needs to leave home and neighborhood and do two years of national service to open their minds and build character to all the positive possibilities of life and not just go into being a worker/consumer. The racketeer powers-that-be certainly do not want this, but this is what America needs if it is to survive beyond the 21st Century.

So Gavin bends-the-rules in order to win and joins the Army as an enlistedman, learning the fundamentals of foot infantry combat techniques in the 1920s. Sometimes the rules have to be bent and the prevailing groupthink refused and Gavin offers an excellent poem on how mankind owes a lot to men who disobey for the common good. Gavin sends home the majority of his meager Army paycheck to his step-parents back home. He spends hours of his time in the library reading to learn more about life and the world and gets accepted into West Point as a self-taught man without benefit of high school.

Saving the Army

At West Point, lacking High School Gavin is in severe catch-up mode, self-teaching himself math late at night but is strong in History so he focuses on his weak areas. He catches up then gets ahead, then climbs to the top few of his class. He then is posted to flight school where he slams into a can't do situation where those running the show want nearly everyone to fail. Gavin, has enough inner confidence now to realize it was not his fault and shrugs off a formal school failure that would end many's careers today. Moreover, he did not retaliate against aviation because of a personal set-back and became the most important post-WW2 Army aviation proponent without letting his lack of being a pilot make him feel unworthy or unqualified for some strange reason. Later, Gavin would become a qualified pilot and rightly call on as many officers as possible to be able to fly to spread ownership of Army Aviation throughout the organization so its fully valued by all parts not become an elitist club, which is yet another wisdom the Army has ignored to our ruin since 1983 when Army Aviation as a separate branch unto itself was created.

Gavin attends other service schools to get a broad mind on war, which is yet another good idea even the cash-strapped Army of the '30s could do and we need to do today. During tactics discussions, the idea of motorizing infantry in wheeled trucks was examined and found wanting. Thousands of men packed in trucks would extend for literally hundreds of miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic and be an extremely vulnerable target. The conclusion was the infantry would be better off walking then in vulnerable, road-bound wheeled trucks yet here we are today with the Stryker/Humvee truck non-sense with thousands of Americans dead/wounded in Iraq/Afghanistan being blown up along roads/trails that we knew to avoid way back in the 1930s. Gavin in his later 1954 article in Harper's magazine "Cavalry and I don't Mean Horses" would condemn the road-bound nature of the garrison complacent Army in the Korean war debacle and call on air-transportable, light tracked armored fighting vehicles like the Ontos assault gun and M113 armored personnel carrier to be created.

Gavin is appointed to teach tactics at West Point and he sees the build-up of Nazi Germany through intelligence reports into a cross-country mobile, tracked mechanized army and air force working together far superior to the warmed-over WW1 style foot-slogging doughboys backed by artillery mentality of the U.S. Army. He realizes that just catching up to the Germans by copying their war machines would leave us always a step behind and when we actually enter the war we could indeed lose it. Gavin was yet again now in a race to keep up and get ahead and change the situation to enable victory as he had done before when he left his coal mine town, self-taught himself to get into West Point and struggled as a cadet to survive, then thrive to graduate high in his class. Now it was not himself that was dangerously behind the power curve, it was the U.S. Army and drastic measures were in order once again.

Saving the Paratroopers

Looking over the German mechanized infiltration style of "lightning war" (blitzkrieg), the decisive factor was that their attacks preceded by parachute and glider troops landing deep behind enemy lines and disrupting the enemy's control of the situation and opening up key terrain points for the tracked tank forces backed by close air support aircraft to pour through. Stonewall Jackson had done the same thing in the U.S. Civil War which resembled WW2 when it was fought with mobility more so than WW1 when it was fought with frontal assaults. Gavin again the gambler, puts in his paperwork to get assigned to the U.S. Airborne being formed at Fort Benning, Georgia but is denied by a typical bureaucratic narrow-minded seeing only the local situation, technicality. Gavin bends the rules and pulls some strings knowing what is at stake even if no one else knows what he must do. He gets into the Airborne and promptly writes the "book" on how to conduct parachute MANEUVER operations, not just seize and hold terrain objectives but to defeat enemy forces far ahead of the main body as a defacto "cavalry". The father of the American Airborne is really not Lee or Ryder, its Gavin. He has his men march mercilessly for 10, 20 miles, stop and think they are to rest, then has them move again to learn how to think well under pressure and confusion. He has the men jump with ALL their equipment to be ready to fight and not to land without their weapons and rely on finding containers which killed many German Fallschirmjaeger on Crete in 1941. He reveals that American 75mm pack howitzers were bundle dropped from under C-47s in 9 separate pieces with their own cargo parachute but connected together by a rope so they all landed together for rapid assembly into firing order. His preparation of his Paratroopers to fight with small unit initiative in non-linear situations was first put to the test on Sicily in 1943.

Knowing he would face German Mark VI Tiger heavy tanks, Gavin secures the use of top-secret 2.36" Bazooka rocket launchers to bolster his pack howitzers. After assembling his men after a scattered night jump, he barely holds onto Biazza Ridge as the bazooka rockets often bounce off the German tanks. Those brave men who knock out a German tank with a bazooka get a patch he designed but behind the scenes Gavin is irate that so many of his men had to die due to inadequate weapons because America was asleep before the war. The Germans, capture some bazookas and improve it by increasing its size and begin using their versions on our weakly armored M4 Sherman tanks. Gavin points out that we keep the pathetic bazooka as-is even into the Korean war where in 1950, it bounced off the 100 Russian T-34/85 medium tanks leading the North Korean invasion. The Germans field a disposable anti-tank rocket launcher, the Panzerfaust and Gavin's men get their revenge by capturing truckloads of them and printing instructions in English so they used them against the Germans to knock their tanks out--another little-known secret of why the American Airborne was so more effective than other less imaginative units. The lesson that we should aggressively capture and use enemy weapons against them especially in non-linear situations where our ammunition supplies may not get through is still unheeded in the U.S. Army.

Gavin creates Pathfinders to improve parachute drop accuracy by radio beacons, colored infared lights and radar, a practice that today has resulted in pin-point accuracy that critics of 3D maneuver warfare refuse to admit. The dispersal of men on the desired location is actually a good thing making them harder to engage. Later battles covered in detail in his previous book, Airborne Warfare reveal his frustration with their foot immobility and inability to defeat enemy tanks. Gavin has gliders land 57mm anti-tank guns towed by jeeps (light, unarmored wheeled trucks) but these take time to get ready to fire unlike a light tank with a turret or an assault gun in the hull. Gavin offers the opinion that the "Bridge Too Far" offensive failed because two allied officers lost battle maps to the Germans who then swarmed against the British Airborne's drop zones west of Arnhem over the roads leading to them. He also says that if we had spent less money on B-17 heavy bombers trying to incinerate German citizens and factories and had more C-47 transports we could have landed all of the British Airborne on the first day and got to Arnhem in full force instead of just LTC Frost's battalion as the later units had to wait to jump in on the succeeding days and were then blocked by the Germans.

As the Russians close in from the east, Gavin is ordered to cross a river to take ground before the Russians get there, but he is not ready and needs more time to get his assault boats. General Dempsey says there is no time and he would provide LVT-4 "Buffalo" amphibious armored tractors to lead his men across, which gives Gavin his first taste of the flexibility of having your own tracked armored mobility can provide. What is still a huge mystery is why these amtracks, landing craft and glider-delivered light tanks and Bren gun tankettes with 75mm pack howitzers were not used at Arnhem to break through even in spite of the Germans knowing our plans?

Saving America

As WW2 ends, Gavin runs into the victorious Russians who are already imbued with the communist "party line" that they had single-handedly won the war all by themselves. Try finding pictures before 1989 of American supplied equipment in Soviet "Great Patriotic War" markings. Gavin points out for the communist system to work and have its people deny themselves creature comforts to feed war production they have to be consistently lied to by government controlled press. Soon we are no longer allies but mortal enemies. The atomic bombs are dropped on Japan and we occupy the home islands lest the Russians barge in. Americans eager to embrace peacetime complacency are fed the lie from their own air force that air bombing ended the war with Japan when clearly it was maneuver that surrounded Japan that coupled with Russia declaring war on them and expelling their army from Manchuria that made them surrender.

Gavin points out how the points system (pardon the pun) began to rip the competent get-the-job-done men out of the Army, leaving combat-less men with M24 Chaffee light tanks in storage at the outbreak of the Korean war where Task Force Smith flown in by measly C-54s was over-run by T-34/85 medium tanks when their 2.36" bazookas failed. Gavin criticizes the lack of USAF airlift as a key factor but we know now today that there were C-124 Globemaster IIs and C-119 Flying BoxCars available to fly in M24 Chaffee lighttanks as well as a Navy Landing Ship Tank that delivered dozens of wheeled trucks and towed artillery pieces to TF Smith. The fault was also the Army's for wanting to fight WW1 style with foot/truck infantry-artillery when cross-country mobile light tanks were available and could be delivered.

Another revelation in the book was that during the Korean war, Gavin and his VISTA group participated in General MacArthur's Inchon landings and investigated why the Army was notgetting close air support from the USAF's jets while the USMC and USN had some prop plane F-4U Corsairs and A-1 SkyRaiders to save the day. Gavin's VISTA group report called on the USAF to get several hundred C-124s long-range and C-123 short-range transports and the Army to get 9-ton Ontos light tracked assault gun/reconnaissance vehicles that could easily be carried en masse inside them to form a "Sky Cavalry", but the report's measures were not adopted.

Part 2 Concept Book: The Vision

Limited wars need specialized forces

Gavin understands that limited wars need QUALITATIVELY superior forces not just large war forces in smaller amounts. This is a reality that today is not understood nor accepted by our "full spectrum" racketeers who insist that any Soldier or marine can do small, sub-national conflicts well. Gavin laments that when we are not fighting with nuclear weapons or to take a nation-state military down in formal battle we fight unconventional enemies poorly. Gavin is implying that the Army's lighter forces should tackle these limited wars but as the years have played out these tend to be narcissistic egomaniacs who over simplify war to what they can carry in their hands and lack the willingness to use technology and machines (tanks and airplanes etc.) to get the qualitative edge we need.

America must pioneer the high ground of Space and not become complacent

Clearly ahead of his time, Gavin sees space as the overarching physical medium for earth war and wants space militarized by the United Nations so it doesn't become a free-for-all for control.

Gavin was ready to put satellites into orbit first but the selfish Navy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Radford conspired with the Secretary of Defense Wilson to sabotage America's space program out of inter-service back-stabbing.

I disagree with Gavin that interservice rivalry is not a problem when clearly he shows it is.

Totalitarian Sovs are more focused

Its refreshing to read Gavin because he's not such an American cheerleader that he cannot see some virtue in what the enemy does. Gavin notes that in totalitarian regimes the powers of the people can be focused by force to get benefits stronger than free countries floundering without consensus, but he warns that this forced unity is not even close to the powers of unity that free people can create if they can be convinced to work together.

We can come up with better ideas through freedom if we challenge ourselves

America is at its best when physically challenged--Gavin wants us to conquer and explore space and not become selfish consumers. He's right about human nature and has no illusions of America being any different than other peoples if we do not challenge ourselves.

4th Dimension of Strategy Means Winning Without Fighting

Gavin explains how actual war is about getting your will accomplished and this is best done without fighting through the mind. This 4th dimensional warfighting is way above the understanding of today's hate-filled morons who just want to kill ragheads as if murdering enough of them will somehow destroy their IDEAS which are actually bullet and bomb-proof. Gavin wants the greater ideas of freedom to win over by merit not by force alone.

Sovs asymmetric ploys

Its fascinating that Gavin suggests that in this 4th dimensional warfare that the Soviets might have actually egged us on to waste billions on bombers which they knew they could shoot down. If applied today its possible that the enemies of America have egged on our Army and marines to buy sexy wheeled trucks which they can easily blow up by laying a bomb in the road. Americans who think smugly that we are so superior to all the people's of the earth cannot even fathom that our enemies may actually be several moves ahead of us in their actions.

Pre-emptive war immoral: Gavin Nails the Neocons Before they were even CONceived

On pages 250-251, Gavin explains liberal and conservative "Cold War" attitudes and thinking which amazingly predicts the sick attitudes of today's neo-conservatives (neocons) which are really Leo Strauss marxists in democratic sheep's clothing. Since they don't give a damn about people in general; their attitude is kill them before they kill us (pre-emptive war); and have no interest whatsoever in security assistance or any assistance to prevent nation-states from falling into chaos by tangibly solving social ills. Straussians believe that the common people need to be fed a national myth to keep them docile as documented by BBC film maker Adam Curtiss in his series "The Power of Nightmares".

Part 1: "Baby, Its Cold Outside"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=881321004838285177

Part 2: The Phantom Victory

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4602171665328041876

Part 3: The Shadows in the Cave

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2081592330319789254

In a previous series, "The Trap" he showed how the neocons to contain communism set up sham democracies to actually keep dictatorships in power while keeping the populace docile with consumerism. Curtis explains how consumerism is manipulated by corporations in his epic series "The Century of the Self" in 2002 broadcast by the BBC as a four-part series. The series tracks how American elites have aggressively used the modern behavioral sciences to persuade, coerce and manipulate the American public into accepting the corporate-government world's version of events as their own.

Part 1: Racketering corporations see people as just emotional, irrational idiots not thinking citizens as per Freud, they go on a binge of consumption and great depression follows

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151

Part 2: FDR saves country but consumerism is re-engaged after WW2 to scare people into building MICC-TT, Freud's daughter stresses social conformity to suppress irrational desires, business provides social conformity products.

This video focuses on one of the most skillful and amoral expert of all the experts in mass manipulation, Edward Bernays. Bernays got his first taste of the power of propaganda during World War I. He advised US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Einsehower and served numerous corporations and business associations. One of his biggest fans was Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, a fact about which Bernays bragged proudly.

In this clip, we see a pattern that Bernays used over and over again: turn a harmless entity into a fearsome enemy through lies and manufactured news items. Then use the "threat" to justify attack. The subject of this video is Bernays campaign against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1953, but you'll have no trouble seeing that this very same method is being used today (Iraq).

www.guba.com/watch/2000915704

Part 3: Sick of conformity and manipulation by corporations, public wants their desires let loose during wild 60s, society's inhibitions are cause of misbehavior, self fulfillment becomes the goal, instead of society classes, corporations pander to the psychological categories of people

www.guba.com/watch/2000915747

Part 4: Give the People What They Want---Public deceived into thinking products will satisfy them, Corporations and Governments get Control; their elected officials are "products", too consumer-based politics pandering to the mob's primal desires, internally-driven bringing about greater and greater physical reality disconnect--possible ecological collapse as we over indulge and consume, destroying spaceship earth; irrational consumers no longer rational citizens abrogating their social fabric to corporations who have no loyalty to them to provide them jobs out-sources product construction to overseas slave labor to increase profits; disaster coming unless we BOYCOTT their products and make them produce ECOFRIENDLY PRODUCTS BUILT BY US and we demand what's BEST not racketeering thru government intervention thru elected officials we elect not bought by the corporations

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036

After this shamocracy failed in post-communist Russia, they installed a phony "democracy" in Iraq hoping that having an influx of outsider corporations coming in to govern would set up a consumerist society. The Iraqis are not satisfied with a Shia FACTIONOCRACY and certainly not with their nation being a vassal state to American corporations to exploit.

THE TRAP

Part 3: Kissinger backing of brutal dictators in order to contain communism, neocons think we should instead expand negative freedom at gunpoint to roll-back communism, armed struggle + bureaucratic shia islam = freedom? wtfo?, reagen neocons export sham democracy (like in Iraq today), a falsade placebo for the people

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqE0J15lGE&NR=1

Part 4: Reagen admin lying about Sandanistas having chemo weapons from Sovs etc., liberal democracy hubris, Soviet collapse results in economic collapse

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzlR5DMLfF8

Part 5: Yeltsin restores order by force, corporations owned by racketeers have Yeltsin in hock, Putin takes charge, imprisons the robber barons, negative consumerism liberty failed in Russia, neocons back in power lying to America to get them to war

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ghvI2R1tM8

Part 6: Bremer fires all capable people like Pol Pot did except without murdering them to get clean slate, country given over to foreign corporations to be governed, massive corruption, typical falsade democracy like during Reagen era, no social contract, rebellion began, we become the French and start torturing/coercion, pre-emptive war manifests as pre-emptive crime arrests, our so-called freedom aka consumersim is not going to hack it in the future

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZuFpWii2jg

Clearly, General Gavin did NOT advocate exporting shamocracy around the world but REAL, representative democracy that would result in American corporations losing their defacto colonial empires where resources are plundered and people work in sweat shops as slaves. This kind of "freedom" requiring real social change and reforms obviously took too much effort and harmed the corporate masters and mentality of the fuck-you neocons so they decided a sham form of freedom, based on consumerism is that all that is needed to placate the masses.

Gavin's brilliant and moral outlook on societal reform is best seen in his 1968 book, Crisis Now which clearly advocates engaging in direct solving of people's problems not shutting them up with consumer goods.

Surevillance Strike Complex

The main idea of his book is that space offers the ultimate "observation post" to direct fire--possibly nuclear fire on the people below and Gavin as a former artillery enlistedman understands this. Gavin is proposing a surveillance strike complex (SSC) a comprehensive system where we can see all our enemies from space, air, land and sea and be able to express mail a nuke by a guided missile if need be.

Guidance/nukes, Mobile Ballistic Missiles

Gavin fully understands that a mobile missile like the German V-2s were impossible to counter-target and joined this with guidance to make the world's first precision guided surface-to-surface missiles under his tenure as Army Research & Development Chief. He wants this mobility for SSMs to be even greater through the use of transport aircraft though the USAF is luke-warm to anything but manned bombers and fighters.

SHE--not nukes labels show relationship or you lose the relationship in minds of the linear

Nuclear weapons are really super high explosives (SHE), Gavin understands this but isn't terrified of them and wants to use small nukes to gain certainty of target destruction. Perhaps had Gavin used SHE instead of "nukes" he would not have scared readers and been more "safe" as a Secretary of Defense.

Strategic Use of Terrain

To evade the reach of the SSM, Gavin proposes we look out to Africa and spread our mobile missile forces out to there and at the same time improve relations with those countries. Had we kept with mobile SSMs in this way we could have blocked Soviet communist inroads to these countries, many of whom still suffer economically to the present day. Gavin's book explains why the USAF is averse to mobile missile basing since be on your toes requires an alertness that a static location should have but seems to not need and can be manned like a 9-to-5 job--which is how America's ICBMs are operated today.

SkyCavalry

Gavin's Sky Cavalry is clearly not just foot-sloggers from helicopters. Gavin wanted VTOL fixed-wing aircraft delivering track-laying vehicles not victims from vulnerable, slow helicopters. Those that want to buy into cliches' and have never read General Gavin's actual words are quick to pin the helicopter air-mobile initiative on him when he was never satisfied with it and complacent with it or anything else. Those that persist with helicopters in the Army disgrace General Gavin's memory and fail to live up to his vision.

Everything Mobile and Armored

An adjunct to the understanding of how lethal the non-linear battlefield is, General Gavin WANTS EVERYONE IN TRACKED ARMOR starting with his baseline M113. Gavin discovers while commanding in Germany that the tracked armored vehicle forces are the only ones with the mobility to disperse and concentrate as needed with protection from nuclear bomb blast, heat and radiation effects. That the Army has still failed to do this, 6 decades later is inexcusable.

DoD is clueless and must be reformed: Clueless civilian mandarins

Gavin explains how the 1947 act creating the Department of Defense (DoD) has been a complete disaster--the people running the Pentagon are clueless. The Joint Chiefs only care abouty their service and the civilians over them have no basis for an educated military opinion of their own. The civilian secretaries are usually taken from business which means they are inclined to racketeer junk for pork. Gavin just doesn't curse the darkness--he offers a tangible solution: provide the civilian secretaries military officers freed from towing their service party line. Of course, his sensible ideas were rejected.

The MICC-TT racket

Towards the end of the book, Gavin points out that economic greed is driving what weapons DoD buys not what's best for the troops and the nation for our defense. The creation of DoD has been to create a permanent war footing to keep the corporations fat and happy--a military, industrial, congressional, think-tank complex. (MICC-TT). Racket Theory explains how DoD is misrun.

Inter-Service Rivalry with Service Chiefs

While describing DoD's basic corruption, Gavin states there is no interservice rivalry problem then goes ahead explains why there is. He is a very patriotic American and he wants to believe the best in his fellow serviceman but the facts show otherwise. Perhaps if he considered racket theory he'd have been less bitter upon retirement. Essentially, most people who join our military are not warrior enthusiasts like Gavin with a sense of adventure, most are weak ego and greedy types who want a sure lifestyle where everything is laid out for them, best described by British Army Engineer and Psychologist, Dr. Norman Dixon in his 1976 book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. I wonder if Gavin ever had a chance to read his book?

The conclusion on Gavin's book, WAPITSA is clear:

GENERAL GAVIN WAS THE GREATEST MILITARY THINKER AMERICA HAS PRODUCED TO DATE.

He deserves to be known as this and more than just a gun'em down troop commander. If the majority of his papers were to be published and made known this would become evident. Reading WAPITSA would be a great way to begin RIGHT NOW--look below--the entire book is below for you to read.

Be Inspired. Enjoy.

I. DUTY WITH THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION.........135
J. THE NEW LOOK.........150
K. CONGRESS AND DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE POLICIES.........157

Chapter 6: Soviet Military Philosophy: "We Will Bury You".........180
Chapter 7: The Decade of Decision: 1955-1965.........199

A. WHAT ARE WE FOR?..........199
B. TACTICS IN AN EARTH WAR..........211
C. STRATEGY AND SPACE.........230
D. ORGANIZATION FOR DEFENSE...........257

Summary-A Strategy for Peace...........288

Index...........291

MAPS

1. Defense of Europe--Africa (following page).........276
2. Defense of Asia (following page).........278
3. Defense of America (following page)..........284

About the Soviet surface-to-air missiles much less is known.

Surface-to-air missiles were displayed in the Fortieth Anniversary Parade in Moscow on November 7, 1957. They were of good size, mobile, and capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

There is no doubt that the Russians have them in operational numbers. As for an opinion on their effectiveness, in an interview with Mr. Reston of the New York Times, which appeared in that newspaper early in October of 1957, Mr. Khrushchev had this to say: "Bombers lack both height and speed for modem combat and are vulnerable to attack by rockets." And in the same newspaper, on November 16, he was reported as saying:

"In spite of what American officials say, bombers are useless compared to rockets. How many bombers can get through and actually deliver hydrogen bombs?" He was later credited with the remark that bombers belong in a museum.

Now. if this was rather sanguine of Mr. Khrushchev, it is understandable. He has had to carry forward his scheming designs under the ever-present shadow of the United States Strategic Air Command. His relish at being in a position to predict its early deterioration is understandable, although perhaps overly enthusiastic. Nevertheless, most scientists would agree that the end of the manned bomber is now clearly in sight. Obviously, a policy based upon massive retaliation by manned bombers will require early revision. Either the policy will have to be revised or we will have to step up missile production so as to have, at an early date, an arsenal of combat-ready, mobile. intermediate and long-range missile systems.

Let us examine, through the limited evidence that has been made available to the public, where we stand in the ICBM race.

Testifying before the Johnson Committee in November of 1957.

Dr. Edward Teller, in reply to a question whether or not the Russians had an intercontinental ballistic missile. stated: "Well,

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I certainly do not know, I cannot say with complete certainty, but I would like to say this: that they have said that they have the weapon. There is every reason to believe that they have it at least in the state where they have constructed it and tested it."

Testifying before the same committee a month later, Dr. Wemher von Braun, upon being queried on whether or not the Russians could put a "hydrogen warhead on the city of Washington," stated: "I would think so. Yes, sir." And on January 23,1958, General Dwight Beach of the Army testified that the Soviets could have an ICBM capability in July of 1958, although a very limited one.

Little has been released of a factual nature on the U.S. ICBM program, although it is a matter of general knowledge that it will be several years before we have an ICBM capability of any significance. This suggests that we are now entering a missile-lag period in which the Soviets will have a steadily increasing ICBM striking capability that we will be unable to match for several years, thus making missile "retaliation" as such, by us, rather meaningless-meaningless except for such shorter-range missiles as IRBMs that we may be able to deploy and maintain on foreign. soil or in foreign waters. These will also seriously lag the Soviet capability in the same ranges.

The Soviets now have shorter-range missiles (seven hundred mile and twelve hundred mile) and their threat at the time of the Suez crisis was not an idle boast. Appearing on "Capitol Cloakroom," a CBS radio broadcast, on December 10, 1956, the Honorable C. Douglas Dillon, then the U.S. Ambassador to France, made quite clear that in his opinion it was the Soviet threat that upset British-French plans to go through with the Suez operation. If this is true, then it was missile diplomacy at its best, and we shall be exposed to more of it as we get farther into the period of "missile lag." There is another significant factor in this missile equation:

the anti-ICBM missile, or the antimissile missile. Testifying

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before the House Armed Services Committee on January 22, 1958, Major General John P. Daley of the Army stated:

To summarize my remarks on the Nike-Zeus [the Army's anti-ICBM missile], the Zeus development is on high priority and we believe that a significant capability could be gotten against ballistic missiles by 1962 if deployment is accelerated.

Thus we will not have a missile to use in defense against a Soviet attacking missile for a number of years either.

This is a situation that we should be frank to recognize, and we should realize that this imbalance, for its duration, will be in the favor of the Soviets. How long will it last? For at least three, and more likely for five years, depending entirely upon the effort we are willing to make to reduce it. The Soviets have already announced their intention of increasing their present margin of lead over us. We are in for a hard pull and no sugarcoated reassurances of our superiority will help us. Only hard work and courage will help. Of interest is a British view of this situation as recently described in The New Statesman: "The Gaither Report has revealed that, irrespective of any efforts which America may now make, the Soviet preponderance in advanced weapons has reached such an absolute stage that America's national survival will depend, until 1961 at least, on 'Russian benevolence.'" Benevolence has never been conspicuous among the traits of the Communists; it is as rare as Khrushchev's shrimp's whistle.

Instead of benevolence we may expect repeated urgings to accept invitations to summit conferences. These will be accompanied by proposals that the West disband NATO, SEATO, and the Baghdad Pact, and by allegations that such alliances threaten the peace-loving workers of the Soviet Union. There will be proposals that we not arm Germany with modern arms, that all nuclear weapons tests be brought to a stop, and that we join the Soviets in the search for new ways to peace. While these things are happening the Russians will make every effort to widen the margin of advantage that they enjoy in the missile

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space race. If we decline to attend a summit conference we may expect Russian proposals to other Western powers to attend without us in the cause of lasting peace. Within the councils of the West there will be increasing talk of the need for some form of disengagement. This will be accompanied by frantic diplomatic efforts to find a formula that would provide us with the security that the military-power imbalance denies us. As disillusionment and discontent grow among our allies they will' become increasingly critical of us. At home, in the United States, there will be talk of withdrawal, reducing foreign aid, and a marked trend toward isolationism. Our position will become very difficult indeed, as it always does when a nation leads from weakness. I am not saying that these things will happen but they certainly may happen unless we wake up and do something about the missile lag.

The "missile lag" so far described pertains to the United States itself. Let us briefly look at the situation overseas, where there are many vital installations, two field armies, and extensive Air Force and Navy deployments. The Soviets, by their admission, have had a mid-range missile, on the order of 400-750 miles, in their inventory since 1956. On November 7, 1957, they paraded a missile through Red Square that was capable of firing hundreds of miles: Its exact range is uncertain but there is no doubt that it is of far greater range than any ballistic missile the Western Allies now have deployed, for instance, the Corporal, with a range of seventy-five miles. Thus, they are in a position today to give immediate tactical missile support to their forces operating in the Middle East and in Europe. And under the protection of their own surface-to-air missiles they can continue this support without fear of decisively harmful retaliation by manned aircraft.

The development of a missile with a range of five hundred miles was undertaken by the United States Army in 1951. Approval granted to the Department of the Army to go ahead with it at that time was later withdrawn by the Department of De-

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fense. By a memorandum of November 26, 1956, the Army was limited to a range of two hundred miles in its tactical surface-to-surface missiles. There have been no restrictions placed on the characteristics of the missiles of the Navy, Marine Corps or Air Force. Only the Army so far has expressed a need for a mid-range surface-to-surface missile. Nothing was done to correct this situation until early 1958, when the Army's program was again authorized. Such missiles should become operational, in quantity in the early sixties.

The problem of defense against mid-range missiles and the longer-range IRBM (fifteen hundred miles) is far more difficult than that of defense against an ICBM. This is due to a number of factors, principally the very quick identification and reaction time required in the defensive system. There has been a program to develop such an antimissile for several years but it has not been given sufficient money and we will be well into the 1960's before it is available for deployment. Thus the "missile lag" at home is matched by a "missile lag" overseas and for the first time in our history we have field armies deployed overseas confronted with weapons against which they can neither retaliate nor defend themselves.

The one bright spot in this otherwise somewhat gloomy picture is the 1959 availability of Jupiter and Thor in some quantity, and the availability of the Navy submarine-launched Polaris several years later. The deployment overseas of Jupiter and Thor should begin in 1958. It will be several years, however, before they are available in adequate numbers and are of adequate reliability. In addition, we must realize that they are the Model Ts of the missile age and we must find ways and means of improving their mobility and reliability. Particular attention must be given to their mobility-they should be entirely mobile.

Tactically, Maginot-Line-like missile-launching facilities offer little promise of dealing effectively with the highly mobile Soviet missiles that they will be matched against. There is an alarming tendency to think of the operational employment of missiles in

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terms of static facilities such as airfields, and blockhouses and bunkers reminiscent of the Maginot Line. Unless we intend to make the same mistake the Germans made with the first V-2 launching sites, we had better plan on mobile missile systems now. They must be mobile to be effective.

There is also a disturbing tendency to become so preoccupied with missiles as to overlook the mobile ground handling equipment, and target acquisition and reconnaissance drones so essential to missile warfare. The latter problem is far from being solved. The assumption is made by many that missiles merely replace bombers and fighter-bombers, and that target information will still be obtained through the use of manned reconnaissance aircraft. This simply is not so. If manned bombers cannot live within the range of enemy missiles, manned reconnaissance craft cannot live there either.

We have an impressive unsolved technical task ahead of us if we are going to have combat-worthy missiles systems. A strange exchange took place at one of the weekly press conferences of the President in Washington on May 8, 1957. Martin J. Arrowsmith of the Associated Press asked the question, "Why should not the Army extend its ballistic missile program to ranges of 1,500 miles, to meet the requirements for tactical missile support. . . ?" The answer was given, «Now, just why or when or what reasons they assign any particular missile, any particular type to one service, is not always readily apparent, but I would say this, just from a knowledge of the Army: Why would the Army want a 1,500-mile missile itself, because the first requisite of using that kind of weapon is that you have very good observations to find out whether it is doing the job you thought it was. The only way that you can find that out would be with an Air Force that could penetrate at least 1,500 miles into the enemy territory, and that puts you right square into the Air Force business." The question referred to "tactical missile support," and the operational concept for such support is to deploy the missiles

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far to the rear, perhaps a thousand miles or more, depending upon the terrain and the depth of the enemy army's tactical missiles. In any case observation must be provided by an unmanned reconnaissance vehicle; for a short-range missile it will be a recoverable drone and for an ICBM it will be, in time, a satellite. Development of both of these is lagging behind the missile program and there is a real probability that when our IRBMs are deployed there will be no reconnaissance systems to support them for some time. One thing is certain, manned reconnaissance aircraft will not be able to fly against the Soviet surface-to-air missile displayed on November 7, 1957.

An analysis of the foregoing, I believe, begins to explain the reason for the widespread concern in political-scientific-military circles for our immediate security. As expressed by Marshal of the RAF, Sir John Slessor: "We should be in mortal danger if Russia were to get ahead of us in the means of defense against the manned bomber, for instance, or in the development of the really long-range guided missile that will replace it." [2] We are in mortal danger and the "missile lag" does portend trouble--trouble of a perilous nature. Under a canopy of fear thrown up by a growing awareness of the Soviet margin of advantage we will be subject to steadily increasing pressures. In the pattern that Lenin described so well, the pressures will be economic and political, and military force will be used only when necessary, but when necessary it will be applied "ruthlessly." Lenin liked to use the word "ruthless," both in describing international military policy and in dealing with internal political policy within the Communist party itself. Whether in a limited action or general war there will be no hesitancy, no moral scruples-force will be applied ruthlessly. The pattern that we have recently seen of the Communists supplying arms to the Algerian Nationalists will be repeated in other areas. Arms support, followed by economic, technical, and political penetration, is the harbinger of armed intervention-if armed intervention proves really neces-

_________________________________________________________

2. The Great Deterrent, Sir John Slessor.

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sary. Regardless of the means required, the goal will be sought, always with due care to avoid giving us an issue worthy of a Washington-Moscow missile exchange.

A much discussed topic today is limited war and much of it, I fear, is wishful thinking. For a limited-war [ED: conventional nation-state war or sub-national conflict] concept is only valid within an impressive over-all capability to wage general war [ED: nuclear nation-state war]. No opponent will ever accommodate us to the extent of allowing us to fight a limited war merely because that is what we want to fight, and, more significantly, because that is all that we are capable of fighting. Actually, a nation dare not risk a limited undertaking without possessing the obvious capability of fighting a general war. And to the extent that we have the latter capability we may indulge ourselves in the former. This applies to both the U.S. and the USSR.

Much of our talk about limited war is retroactive in nature.

Ten years too late we have come to realize that we should have had a limited war capability at the time of Korea-which we lacked. It was assumed by many that a limited capability was but a small part of a general-war capability, and that if we could fight a general war we could certainly fight a limited war. Deputy Secretary of Defense Quarles has said that "if we have the strength required for global war we could certainly meet any threat of lesser magnitude." This is not true, for limited war in its own way is a highly specialized form of combat, more specialized than general global war. It is as though one were to compare skillful surgery to a killing blow. The first requires special instruments applied with restraint, quickly and accurately, the latter a bludgeon with only one object, complete destruction.

To assume that SAC can deal effectively with every type of limited action is the same as to assume that since a tank battalion can be used to control extensive land areas, one tank can be used to catch a pickpocket or car thief. To win limited war requires special weapons, equipment and techniques. These may be useful, and probably would be, in general war but the contrary is not true; the Strategic Air Command would be

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I therefore asked my Deputy to go to the Army's Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama, and talk to General Medaris and Dr. von Braun about the feasibility of a satellite interceptor. He did so on June 21, 1957, and reported that they would undertake a study of a satellite interceptor at once. On August 26, 1957, Mr. Khrushchev announced to the world:

A super-long-distance intercontinental multi-stage ballistic missile was launched a few days ago. The tests of the rocket were successful.

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They fully confirmed the correctness of the calculations and the selected design.

The missile flew at a very high, unprecedented altitude. Covering a huge distance in a brief time, the missile landed in the target area. The results obtained show that it is possible to direct missiles into any part of the world. ~

This information was soon confirmed by other intelligence and "it was clear that the Soviets were on the threshold of launching their satellite". The information was studied carefully and, at a meeting of the Army Scientific Advisory Panel on September 12, 1957, I told them that in my opinion, the Soviets would launch their satellite within thirty days.

On October 4, I had lunch with Dr. von Braun and Dr. Schilling at the Redstone Arsenal, at which time we agreed that, based upon all available intelligence, the Soviet launching was imminent. We discussed the situation at some length and we agreed that if a launching took place, two steps had to be taken, as matters of highest national urgency: the development of a satellite to intercept the satellite, and the development of a large, militarily useful satellite. That evening a number of scientists, businessmen and military people were gathered together for dinner in the Officers' Mess at the Arsenal, when the announcement of the Soviet satellite launching was received. I felt crushed and wanted to take a long walk to think the situation over alone. The last thing that I wanted to do was to attend a dinner party. But it was not the time to be antisocial.

After all of our efforts to launch first we had been beaten into space. And, more important, we had no idea what the satellite carried. Even now, we realize that we may never know.

http://news.aol.com/story/ar/_a/secrets-of-sputnik-emerge-50-years-later/20071001145509990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Secrets of Sputnik Emerge 50 Years Later

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, AP
Posted: 2007-10-01 17:38:13

Filed Under: Science News, World News

MOSCOW (Oct. 1) - When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

A Soviet rocket carrying the satellite Sputnik blasts off on Oct. 4, 1957, from Kazakhstan. Fifty years later, scientists involved with the launch have shed some new light on the event, which stunned the world and opened the space age.

But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.

And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program.

In a series of interviews in recent days with The Associated Press, Chertok and other veterans told the little-known story of how Sputnik was launched, and what an unlikely achievement it turned out to be.

Chertok couldn't whisper a word about the project through much of his lifetime. His name, and that of Sergei Korolyov, the chief scientist, were a state secret. Today, at age 95 and talking to a small group of reporters in Moscow, Chertok can finally give full voice to his pride at the pivotal role he played in the history of space exploration.

"Each of these first rockets was like a beloved woman for us," he said. "We were in love with every rocket, we desperately wanted it to blast off successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see it flying."

This very rational exuberance, and Korolyov's determination, were the key to Sputnik's success.

So was happenstance.

As described by the former scientists, the world's first orbiter was born out of a very different Soviet program: the frantic development of a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb.

Because there was no telling how heavy the warhead would be, its R-7 ballistic missile was built with thrust to spare - "much more powerful than anything the Americans had," Georgy Grechko, a rocket engineer and cosmonaut, told AP.

The towering R-7's high thrust and payload capacity, unmatched at the time, just happened to make it the perfect vehicle to launch an object into orbit - something never done before.

Without the looming nuclear threat, Russian scientists say, Sputnik would probably have gotten off the ground much later.

"The key reason behind the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Chertok said. "The military missile was the main thing we were thinking of at the moment."

When the warhead project hit a snag, Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, seized the opportunity.

Korolyov, both visionary scientist and iron-willed manager, pressed the Kremlin to let him launch a satellite. The U.S. was already planning such a move in 1958, he pointed out, as part of the International Geophysical Year.

But while the government gave approval in January 1956, the military brass wanted to keep the missile for the bomb program, Grechko, 76, said in an interview. "They treated the satellite as a toy, a silly fantasy of Korolyov."

The U.S. had its own satellite program, Grechko said. "The Americans proudly called their project "Vanguard," but found themselves behind us."

The Soviet Union already had a full-fledged scientific satellite in development, but it would take too long to complete, Korolyov knew. So he ordered his team to quickly sketch a primitive orbiter. It was called PS-1, for "Prosteishiy Sputnik" - the Simplest Satellite.

Grechko, who calculated the trajectory for the first satellite's launch, said he and other young engineers tried to persuade Korolyov to pack Sputnik with some scientific instruments. Korolyov refused, saying there was no time.

"If Korolyov had listened to us and started putting more equipment on board, the Americans could have opened the space era," Grechko said.

The satellite, weighing just 184 pounds, was built in less than three months. Soviet designers built a pressurized sphere of polished aluminum alloy with two radio transmitters and four antennas. An earlier satellite project envisaged a cone shape, but Korolyov preferred the sphere.

"The Earth is a sphere, and its first satellite also must have a spherical shape," Chertok, a longtime deputy of Korolyov, recalled him saying.

Sputnik's surface was polished to perfection to better deflect the sun's rays and avoid overheating.

The launch was first scheduled for Oct. 6. But Korolyov suspected that the U.S. might be planning a launch a day earlier. The KGB was asked to check, and reported turning up nothing.

Korolyov was taking no chances. He immediately canceled some last-minute tests and moved up the launch by two days, to Oct. 4, 1957.

Korolyov with first man in space, Colonel Yuri Gagarin

"Better than anyone else Korolyov understood how important it was to open the space era," Grechko said. "The Earth had just one moon for a billion years and suddenly it would have another, artificial moon!"

Soon after blastoff from the arid steppes of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, the satellite sent out what would be the world's most famous beep. But the engineers on the ground didn't immediately grasp its importance.

"At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done," Chertok recalled. "We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok. Only four or five days later did we realize that it was a turning point in the history of civilization."

Immediately after the launch, Korolyov called Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to report the success. Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who was alongside his father at the moment, recalled that they listened to the satellite's beep-beep and went to bed.

Sergei Khrushchev said that at first they saw the Sputnik's launch as simply one in a series of Soviet technological achievements, like a new passenger jet or the first atomic power plant.

"All of us - Korolyov's men, people in the government, Khrushchev and myself - saw that as just yet another accomplishment showing that the Soviet economy and science were on the right track," the younger Khrushchev, now a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, said in a telephone interview.

The first official Soviet report of Sputnik's launch was brief and buried deep in Pravda, the Communist Party daily. Only two days later did it offer a banner headline, quoting the avalanche of foreign praise.

Pravda also published a description of Sputnik's orbit to help people watch it pass. The article failed to mention that the light seen moving across the sky was the spent booster rocket's second stage, which was in roughly same orbit, Chertok said.

The tiny orbiter was invisible to the naked eye.

Excited by the global furor, Khrushchev ordered Korolyov immediately to launch a new satellite, this time, to mark the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

"We didn't believe that you would outpace the Americans with your satellite, but you did it. Now you should launch something new by Nov. 7," Korolyov quoted Khrushchev telling him, according to Grechko.

Working round-the-clock, Korolyov and his team built another spacecraft in less than a month. On Nov. 3, they launched Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds. It carried the world's first living payload, a mongrel dog named Laika, in its tiny pressurized cabin.

The dog died of the heat after a week, drawing protests from animal-lovers. But the flight proved that a living being could survive in space, paving the way for human flight.

The first Sputnik beeped for three weeks and spent about three months in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere. It circled Earth more than 1,400 times, at just under 100 minutes an orbit.

For Korolyov there was bitterness as well as triumph. He was never mentioned in any contemporary accounts of the launch, and his key role was known to only a few officials and space designers.

Leonid Sedov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences with no connection to space program, was erroneously touted in the West as the Father of Sputnik. Korolyov, meanwhile, was only allowed to publish his non-sensitive research under the pseudonym "Professor K. Sergeyev."

Khrushchev rejected the Nobel committee's offer to nominate Korolyov for a prize, insisting that it was the achievement of "the entire Soviet people."

Sergei Khrushchev said his father thought singling out Korolyov would anger other rocket designers and hamper the missile and space programs.

"These people were like actors; they would all have been madly jealous at Korolyov," he said. "I think my father's decision was psychologically correct. But, of course, Sergei Korolyov felt deeply hurt."

Korolyov's daughter, Natalia, recalled in a book that the veil of secrecy vexed her father. "We are like miners - we work underground," she recalls him saying. "No one sees or hears us."

The Soviet Union and the rest of the world learned Korolyov's name only after his death in 1966. Today his Moslades so long denied them.

"The rivalry in space, even though it had military reasons, has pushed the mankind forward," said Valery Korzun, a cosmonaut who serves as a deputy chief of the Star City cosmonaut training center. "Our achievements today are rooted in that competition."

In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 22 years later. Khrushchev wasn't interested in getting there, his son says, and the effort made under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was underfunded and badly hampered by rifts between Korolyov and other designers.

"We wouldn't have been the first on the moon anyway," Grechko said. "We lost the race because our electronics industry was inferior."

Today, even as Sputnik recedes into the history books, its memory still exercises a powerful grip. In August, when a Russian flag was planted on the sea bed at the North Pole, the Kremlin compared it to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon - an indication, perhaps, of how much Russians still treasure that first victory in space.

I turned to the president of one of our large business corporations who was present and told him how disturbed I was, and he replied: "Oh, it's nothing at all, nothing at all. It doesn't

___________________________________________________________

Excerpt from text of Soviet statement, New York Times, August 27, 1957.

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amount to a thing." That disturbed me almost as much as the satellite launching itself, but I didn't realize until the next day that this opinion was shared by many. The reaction varied from Secretary Wilson's "a neat scientific trick" to other's "a silly bauble," "a hunk of iron," and Madame Cafritz' observation as reported in the Washington Post on October 7, 1957: "The satellite is very appropriate for Russia to have because she has so many of them." Fortunately, there were some who realized at once the importance of it. Senator Henry M. Jackson, in the New York Times of October 6, 1957, described the Soviet launching as "a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States." In the following month, Dr. Edward Teller, testifying before the Johnson Preparedness Subcommittee, said:

Others testifying before Congress stated that it was the most significant military event of our time, which is exactly what it was.

Before leaving the satellite, I would like to comment on the cost aspects of it. For there are those who will say, "Well, we simply couldn't afford everything, and it would have been wasteful to put money into another satellite program." The facts are that Jupiter C, as was well known, is part of another program and its satellite launchings have cost but a few million dollars. The first cost estimates of Vanguard were in the vicinity of twenty million dollars. Both of these together cost but a small part of another program that was being carried on at the same time. That was the Navaho, an unmanned bomber, which was promptly discontinued by Secretary McElroy

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shortly after he took office. The Navaho had cost seven hundred million dollars before being canceled. The big question is why in the name of heaven was money being spent on such a scale and in such a wasteful manner while we were denying ourselves a satellite. Was it caused by industrial pressure, service interest, or simply poor decision-making in the Department of Defense? Of one thing we may be sure, our failure to launch a satellite first was not due to lack of money in the Department of Defense budget.

Now we can foresee that by the end of the Decade of Decision, 1965, manned space Bight will be here. We will then be ready to undertake manned exploration of the planetary system. The earth will have shrunk, in a military sense, to a rather small tactical theater. It will be entirely possible to launch weapons from any point on the earth to impact at any other point on the earth, exactly as in past combat it has been possible in a tactical engagement to engage directly any opponent with the weapons at hand.

In World War II, for example, a tactical theater was usually thought of as a continent, or a major segment of a continent. By 1965, missiles and satellites will have shrunk the world to such small size that the earth itself will be a tactical theater. We will truly live a hair-triggered existence in a "balance of terror." Everyone will be faced with the threat of immediate death and destruction, if means of guaranteeing peace are not found. Surely this is a grim and forbidding prospect and it is one from which we dare not shrink if we are to survive-not only the Western world but the Soviet world as well.

The challenge with which we are faced is tremendous and the implications of it far-reaching. The very nature of strategy will change, leaving the realm of physical combat and going into full-scale psychological warfare, and leaving the earth's environment and going into space. War, which we have thought of in three dimensions, has now acquired a fourth dimension: strategy. Modern strategy is the fourth dimension of warfare.

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Our organizational structure to deal with these problems needs radical changing, both in the Department of Defense and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Armed Forces themselves, and the missions they may be expected to perform, will, of necessity, change radically. And by 1965 they will be entirely overlapping in their capabilities. The old definition of functions J based upon land, sea and air will be far outdated. There will I be risks and sacrifices inherent in almost any solutions found '0 these problems, but they must be solved and the beneJicial : results to be gained are well worth the extraordinary effort 1 required to solve them. And the fundamental and essential, ingredient in our thinking and planning absolutely must be, moral courage. Finally, whether we like it or not, the burden of leadership has been thrust upon us. And any failures will not be our failures, alone; they will be the failures of free men everywhere. Leadership and power are inseparable, and the power available today surpasses man's imagination. We must learn to live with that power, and to cause it to serve us and not become slaves to it. This should be the essence of our leadership.

On us the burden falls to lead the nations, out of this frightful wilderness of steel; On us depends the course of that which is;

i To come hereafter-whether freedom was f A stolen dream from Heaven, or is the truth.

On which to found the future of mankind.[5]

________________________________________________________________

5. From My Country by Russell W. Davenport, published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

I was disappointed and deeply disturbed. I continued to fret over the problem in my mind and I decided that the solution was in the words, "it would be necessary to have an officer of equal ability ordered to this station." Upon the completion of work the following Friday night, I drove to Washington to see a friend in the office of personnel, in the Chief of Infantry's office. He was Major Bill Kean and he was most sympathetic and helpful. We decided that by locating the list of officers that the superintendent had desired for assignment the preceding year, and verifying their availability, I would be able to present him with a suitable replacement. It took several more trips and numerous conferences.

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Both the superintendent and the commandant were most considerate and I was ordered to parachute duty in July.

I started training as a Paratrooper on August 1, 1941. Colonel Bill Ryder was in charge of the school and doing a wonderful job.

An entire new world opened to me. Problems of weapons, equipment, training and tactics all were begging for solution. I graduated from the parachute school in late August and was given command of a parachute company, "C" Company of the 503^rd Parachute Infantry. Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to the grade of major and moved to Battalion Headquarters, and then to the top Parachute Headquarters in the Army, the Provisional Parachute Group, commanded by Brigadier General Bill Lee. I was given the job of S-3 and at once set to work writing the first manual for The Employment of Airborne Forces. On November 21, we staged the first big parachute jump in the history of our country, a battalion jump of the 502^nd Parachute Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was senior umpire of the exercise and it was a revelation of the problems involved, both in airborne attack and in defense against airborne attack.

Assignment to the Staff School at Fort Leavenworth followed early in '42. We were in the war then and a high pitch of excitement, muted somewhat by the sober realization that we were personally destined for combat responsibilities, prevailed. Except for the airborne instruction, the courses were excellent and just what we needed, as we were soon to learn in battle itself. The airborne problem in the course consisted of a map exercise in which a parachute platoon jumped on the roof of the First National Bank in Kansas City. I got some wry looks from the faculty and snickers from the class when I asked about a possible use of a parachute division. It was pointed out that this was utterly impossible for many reasons. In the first place, there was no such thing in existence and the problems of equipment, training and control, both in the air and on the ground, had not even been considered. Finally, even if one had a parachute division, it would take twenty-five airfields to enable it to take off, and this was too

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fantastic even to think about-anywhere in the world. Normandy was then two years away.

My feelings were assuaged by a story that an instructor told me of a truck-mobility exercise conducted by the students between World War I and World War II. It was based upon the German invasion of France in World War I. As history now shows, the enveloping right wing of the German Army failed to carry out its role and thus the French left wing, and perhaps the entire army, was saved from annihilation. Analyzing the campaign in the twenties, and on the assumption that the gasoline engine was here to stay and would be used in numbers in war, the students were given unlimited truck mobility to carry out the German attack once again in a map exercise. After loading all of the German troops in trucks and stringing them back on miles and miles of roads, they reached the conclusion that, as the battle was joined, the trucks were a disadvantage and the German Army would have been better off without them. They actually slowed the German attack down. So, the conclusion: foot mobility is better than truck mobility. And now we were encountering the same logic in opposing air mobility.

Whenever a new weapon, or a new tactical method, is introduced, it always looked upon with the gravest suspicion. That is one reason why a study of the History of War is so important, since through it can be seen over the ages the effect on war of such novelties. Such a study shows that the human mind has been slow to grasp the possibilities of the new arrival and to adopt the tactics which will put it to the best use. In fact, as in the case of the [tracked, cross-country mobile] tank, the new arrival has usually been treated as an adjunct to, and clothed in the tactics of, the older arms. [2]

This touches upon one of the most serious problems that will always confront the Republic, the toleration of new ideas and intelligent criticism. For without these two ingredients in our thinking, particularly our military thinking, we will not survive. And now, as we attain maturity in the world family of nations, we must provide leadership, and leadership needs ideas and must

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2. The War on the Civil and Military Fronts, General G. M. Lindsay.

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be able to tolerate criticism. "If our treatment of the honest and skilled dissident is not to be liberal, then the army will be filled with more time-servers than in the past and will stagnate, to the great waste of the nation's treasure and, later, its life" [3] As expressed by Robert G. Ingersoll:

Heady tonic for a Soldier, nevertheless, we should be ever mindful of the need for tolerance toward new ideas. And as technology becomes more dynamic, the more reason to be more tolerant, since new ideas will come at a faster rate. For success or failure in war, and our very survival, will then hang by a thin thread indeed.

But in 1942 we still had time in our favor and the war was far away, although getting closer by the minute. School ended in early April and I returned to Fort Bragg where General Bill Lee had the Airborne Command. We were growing. Fortunately, I was returned to the job of S-3 and thus I was able to start to work at once on an organization for an airborne division. New gliders were becoming available and these combined with parachutes seemed to offer some prospect of combat feasibility for a thirteen thousand-man division. The basic decision was made not to copy the German Crete operation and use regular forces, merely, providing them airlift, but to go all out on a new type of organization and new types of equipment. But the problems encountered were almost beyond belief. Parachute artillery, for example-how were we to get it from plane to firing position on the ground in a few minutes? The project was headed up by a dynamic driving young paratrooper, now a minister, Colonel Shinberger. By breaking the weapon into nine parts, each could be dropped by

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3. The Pattern of War, Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tucker.

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parachute separately. But recovering them from the treetops, ditches, rooftops and wherever they happened to land sometimes took days, if all pieces could be found at all. Schinberger finally tied the parts together with a rope, six under the plane suspended in mid-air and the remaining three in the door-all tied together with the same rope. A Rube Goldberg rig that took a brave pilot to fly. But brave pilots were in abundance-the Troop Carrier pilots of the Air Corps never asked what we were up to, they merely asked what we wanted them to do, and they always came through. My admiration for them increased with each day of the war.

Gavin and his comrades got the idea of equipment containers made into carts from studying the German Airborne victory on Crete in 1941 though not being too dependant on them, by having each Paratrooper jumping in his own equipment using lowering line loads.

About my last act with General Lee was to go to Washington and help select the first division to be made airborne. It was the 82^nd Infantry Division and from it was taken, Eve-like, the nucleus of the 101^st. It was activated that fall. In the meantime, I had been assigned to the 505^th Parachute Infantry, my first regimental command. I looked forward eagerly to solving the tactical problems about which we had theorized so freely in the last year. We went into training at Fort Benning and then moved to Fort Bragg before leaving for Africa in April of 1943.

One of our most troublesome problems had been that of dealing with tanks. It was just so much nonsense to put a division of thirteen thousand men into combat with no ability to stop a tank; they would simply be mincemeat. Just before leaving Fort Benning, I wandered out to the weapons test range one day to look at some new rifle grenades that were supposed to be able to "penetrate tank armor". While there, I noticed a blanket-covered table and my curiosity drew me to it.

One of the test officers saw me coming over and said, "You got, to stay away from that, Colonel, it's a new secret weapon." That really whetted my appetite.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Well, we can't tell you," he said, "but it will punch a hole in any tank living. They call it a bazooka."

"I'd sure like to see it," I said. "I've got a combat regiment and

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we won't be around long, and we sure need an antitank weapon."

"Well," he said, "in that case, I'll let you feel it, but I am not allowed to show it to you."

I walked over and felt the blanket under his watchful surveillance. It felt like a piece of gas pipe about five feet long. But that didn't matter if it could do as he said, stop any tank living.

For that was what we needed more than anything else; a good antitank weapon was essential to combat confidence at that stage of our training. We did not realize it at the time, but our first face-to-face meeting with German Tiger [ED: heavy] tanks of the Hermann Goering Division was not far away.

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Opportunity came on the night of July 9, 1943. I had been designated as the Commander of the 505^th Parachute Combat Team. My command consisted of over three thousand paratroopers, including Infantry, Artillery, Engineers, Medics and Signal Corpsmen. Our mission was to jump on Sicily six hours ahead of the amphibious landing, seize key terrain features, including one airfield, and block the movement of German and Italian reserves toward the beaches.

To me the battle in prospect was the climax of a lifetime of study and preparation: if ideas and new tactical concepts were really the payoff, here was to be the proof. I looked forward to it eagerly, fully confident of the fighting ability of the troopers and sure of the success of the plan. To the troopers it represented their first opportunity to test their mettle against veterans. If training and work-"A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood" -combined with the best weapons in the world could do it, they had it made. They were confident that they had the best weapons in the world; not only had they been told this frequently, but most of us believe this about most things, American anyway.

Air-landing in Tunisia just one month before, on June 9, 1943, we had time to lose about twenty pounds of weight per man from the combined effects of training, poor rations, and the seasonal siroccos then scorching the African earth. The month's

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time also gave me opportunity to make a night reconnaissance of the drop zones on the island. An RAF pilot from Malta took me in and I saw for the first time the exact drop zones on which we were to land.

The fateful day of July 9, 1943 seemed to rush upon us, so busy were we with last-minute preparations, and almost before we realized it, we were gathered in small groups under the wings of our C-47s ready for loading and takeoff. Appearing from a distance every bit like Strasbourg geese, the airplanes were so loaded with parachute bundles suspended beneath them that they seemed to drag the ground. Because of security restrictions, it had not been possible to inform every trooper of our destination until just before takeoff. Then each was given a small slip of paper which read as follows:

The plan was simple. Taking off from Tunisia in a long column of flights of nine aircraft, we were to fly via the island of Linosa to Malta. There we were to dog-leg to the left, coming in on

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Sicily's southwestern shore. This was an important point-the island was to come into sight on the right side of the approaching aircraft. The orders were that every man would jump even though there might be some uncertainty in his mind as to his whereabouts. No one but the pilots and crews were to return to North Africa.

Individual equipment was given a final and solicitous check and loading began. The equipment consisted of a rifle or carbine, rations, water, knife, grenade, compass, and here and there a bazooka. The latter were most important since they were the only weapons that the troopers were carrying that would enable them to engage German armor on reasonable terms. The pilots were revving up their engines and we were ready to roll down the runway when an airman from the weather station ran up to the door of the plane yelling for me: "Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here?"

"Here I am," I answered, and he yelled, "I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east." He added, "They thought that you would want to know".

Well, I did, but there was nothing that I could do about it.

Training jumps had normally been canceled when the wind reached about fifteen miles an hour, in order that we might minimize injuries. Few of us had ever jumped over twenty-five miles an hour. But there was nothing that we could do about this now. Besides, there were many other hazards of greater danger than the thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind in prospect.

At about this time in my troubled thinking another individual staggered to the door of the plane with a huge barracks bag on his shoulder. He heaved it through the door onto the door of the plane, saying as he did so: "I was told to give this to you or your S-1." I asked, "What in the hell is it?" He replied: "They are prisoner-of-war tags. You are supposed to put one on every prisoner that you capture, and be sure to fill it out properly."

It was no time for argument, when we were within seconds of roaring down the runway and so I merely replied, "Okay." About an hour after departure, the S-1 (Captain Ireland) threw them into the Mediterranean.

We were airborne as first darkness touched the land. The flight was uneventful until Linosa was due. It was not to be seen. Likewise Malta, which was to be well lighted to assist our navigators, could not be seen. Suddenly ships by the score became visible in the ocean below, all knifing their way toward Sicily. Obviously We were off course since our plan called for us to fly between the American fleet on the left and the British on the right. In fact, the Americans told us that we would probably be shot down if we overflew them. We continued on, finally dog-legging to the left on the basis of time calculation. Soon the flash of gunfire could be seen through the dust and haze caused by the preinvasion bombing, and finally the coast itself could be seen off to the right.

Unfortunately many of the planes overflew the Malta dog-leg and the island first became visible on the left, thus causing confusion and widespread dispersion of the troopers. We turned inland; the small arms fire increased; the green light i(,wer the jump door went on and out we went. The reception was mixed. Some of us met heavy fighting at once, others were unopposed for some time, but all were shaken up by the heavy landings on trees, buildings and rocky hillsides.

I managed to get together a small group and start across country, searching for the combat team objective. I had with me Captain Ireland, the combat team S-1, and Captain Vandervoort, the combat team S-3. The cross-country going was rough, but we pressed on. Soon we came face to face with our first enemy.

It happened about an hour after we had landed. I was moving ahead with about twenty troopers. I was leading and Vandervoort was alongside. I had been picking up troopers as I moved along through the shadows in the olive groves, over stone walls, darting across moonlit roads, moving in what I hoped was

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the direction of our objective. There had been occasional bursts of small-arms fire, sometimes quite close, but so far we had not seen an actual enemy. Suddenly there were foreign voices, then the sound of a man whistling some distance away. As he got closer it sounded like "0 Sole Mio." I had my group stay down and I moved up to a stone wall that paralleled the road he was coming along. It was a lone man, walking down the middle of the road, hands in the pockets of his baggy uniform pants, and whistling. After twenty years of military service, I was about to meet The Enemy face to face. I stuck my head up over the stone wall. It seemed like way up, but it was about an inch, just enough to clear my carbine over the top of the wall.

I gave him my best Italian, "Alto." He stopped in his tracks.

Vandervoot rushed through an opening in the wall with a .45 in one hand and a knife in the other.

"I'll take care of him;' Van said. I wasn't sure what he meant, but I said, "No, let's get the hell out of the middle of the road. Let's get over into the shadows and maybe we can get '" some information out of him." There was still some doubt whether we were in Sicily, Italy or the Balkans, although the odds strongly favored the first.

About a half-dozen of us surrounded him and I tried the few Italian words I knew.

"Dove Palermo?" No reply. He seemed too scared or too bewildered to answer.

"Dove Siracusa?" I figured that if he would point in the general direction of either or both of these two cities, which were at opposite ends ',~ of the island, we could get our first rough fix on where we were.

Since he acted as if he had never heard of either, for a moment it seemed that perhaps we were not even in Sicily. But he was obviously very scared. We had heard that the Germans had scared the wits out of the natives with their stories about the atrocities committed by American parachutists. They spread the news that we were criminals and long-term prisoners who

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had been given our freedom in exchange for becoming paratroopers. This was given credence by the practice in many 'parachute units of having all of the men shave their heads clean. After the Battle of Sicily was over, the Sicilians pointed this out to us as being one of the things that convinced them that the Germans were right.

But to get back to Giuseppe, or whatever his name was. I hadn't been able to get anything out of him-neither his name, where he was from, nor where he thought we were. I reluctantly decided that we would have to take him along. Now Vandervoort had taken an intelligence course and knew how to .", handle a prisoner in a situation like this. The idea was to take '" the belt out of the prisoner's trousers and to cut the buttons off his Hy so that he would have to hold up his trousers when he walked.

Van put his .45 [ED: Colt M1911A1 semi-automatic combat pistol] in its holster, pressed his knife against the Italian's chest, saying as he did so: "I'll take care of the bastard." The Italian was muttering, "Mamma mia, mamma mia," over "" and, over again. His concern was understandable. The moonlight was shining on the knife blade and it looked as though it were a foot long. He took off his belt and dropped it. Then Van went into Phase Two of the operation and reached for his blade with one hand, bringing the knife down with the other.

A scream went up that could be heard all of the way to Rome.

The atrocities of the paratroopers and the stories that he had heard about Ethiopia must have Hashed through his mind; he was being castrated. He screamed louder, grabbing the knife blade with his right hand. The blood ran down his hand as we fell in a kicking, yelling, fighting mass. We were on the edge of a gully and we rolled partly down it. It was pitch black and out of the tumbling mass he got away. I do not know how he did it, but one second he was with us and the next he was gone. I was madder than hell. I asked Vandervoort, "What in the hell did you think you were doing?" Vandervoort didn't answer. I decided that we had better get

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going. By now we had probably alerted any enemy for miles around.

We marched and crawled into the night. Although some men were wounded and suffering from jump injuries, they drove themselves toward the cascading flame and white phosphorus of bursting shells that could be seen far away on the distant horizon.

The sight of shell bursts was reassuring, since it meant that we were in Sicily. That is where the battle was to be fought. And we were "moving toward the sound of the guns," one of the first battle axioms that I had learned as a cadet at West Point.

But human flesh could do only so much, and the night was demanding. By count at daylight, there were but six of us. I approached two farmhouses, but at each the natives were terrified and would hardly talk. I continued on in a direction that I figured would take us toward our objective. Suddenly, as we came over the crest of some high ground, there was a burst of small-arms fire.

We hit the ground. There was a sickening thud of near misses kicking dirt into my face. I reacted instinctively as I had been taught in the infiltration course by hugging closely to the ground. In no time I realized that I would not continue to live doing that; I had to shoot back. I started firing with my carbine and it jammed. I looked to Vandervoort about six feet to my left and he was having the same trouble. In front, about fifty yards away, an officer stood looking through low hanging branches of an olive tree. He was wearing leatller puttees and reddish-brown breeches, both plainly visible beneath the branches. Ireland gave him the first squirt of his tommy gun [.45 caliber Thompson fully automatic sub-machine gun] and he went down like a rag doll. I began to make my carbine work single shot. The leading trooper, who had gone down at the first fusillade, writhed and rolled over. He appeared to be dead, practically in the enemy position. Their fire increased and, there was a loud explosion like a small mortar shell. I decided that there was at least a platoon of enemy and our best prospects were to try to work around it. I yelled to Vandervoort,

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Ireland and the troopers to start moving back while I covered.

It worked.

We had had a close call and nothing to show for it, and our prospects were not very bright. I continued to move cross-country in a direction that would take me around the area where we had the firefight. We could hear intense firing from time to time and we were never sure when we would walk into another fire fight, nor were we sure of the manner in which we would get into the fight since we couldn't tell friend from foe. Then there was the problem of enemy armor. We were in trouble and virtually helpless against enemy armor. I decided to look for a place where tanks would be unlikely to travel and where we could get good cover to hole up until dark. I wanted to survive until dark, and then to strike across country again to the combat , team objective. It was the high ground east and north of Gela, and there, with the help of God, I hoped to find troopers, and an enemy to fight. For that is what I had come three thousand miles and thirty-six years of my life for-the moral and physical challenge of battle. By midmorning we came to the place. It was criss-crossed by several irrigation ditches. Along one of them there was a thicket of underbrush. The ditch was cut out of the side of a gently sloping hill and from its edge there was a good view for about a half of a mile across cultivated land. The ditch I picked was almost dry, although the others had a lot of water in them.

It did not appear to be the place where a tank would travel by choice. And this was important. I took stock of the situation and it wasn't good. Among us we had two carbines that jammed, one tommy gun, a pistol and an M-l [ED: Garand semi-automatic 8-shot 7.62mm x 82mm long-range rifle]. We were holed up like hunted animals. Tired, wounded, hungry, but too sick at heart to eat, we apprehensively scanned the countryside for any sign of friend or foe. Occasional bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire could be heard in the distance.

"A hell of a place for a regimental commander," I said to Vandervoort, and he nodded his head in assent.

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I remembered almost bursting with pride when General Ridgway, just two months before, took me aside one evening and told me that I was to command the parachute assault forces going into Sicily. It was a lifetime ambition about to be realized.

And now my "command" consisted of four shaken troopers holed up in a muddy ditch.

A fusillade of shots rang out.

The firing was intense. It was far off to the right, perhaps over a mile away. Should I look into it? I couldn't afford to lose another man if I was to have enough strength to fight my way back through my own lines after dark.

"What do you think, Ireland?" I asked.

"Well, we've got two carbines that don't work. We have already lost one man. I have a bad leg. You have too. We have no idea where in the hell we are, except we believe that we're in Sicily. It doesn't make much sense for us to go wandering around looking for a fight and when we find it probably walk into the wrong side of it."

"Okay," I said, "but this is a hell of a place to be in and I don't like it. We will still figure on waiting until dark," I added.

It was a hell of a place. It was approaching noon and the hot July sun was burning down. Since early morning I had been aware of a big house about a half-mile away. It was three stories high with the bottom Hoor lost in trees and shrubbery, big for the Sicilian countryside. There were several windows that overlooked us and I kept watching for movement in them.

Surely the house wouldn't be empty, but after several hours of watching not a sign of life was in evidence. Perhaps I should run a patrol over and look it over.

"Van, what do you think of that house? Have you been able to pick up any movement about it? Maybe we ought to go over and take a closer look."

"I don't know," he said. "I've been watching it too. If we break up into two groups, neither will be large enough to do

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much, and if we all go out there we may get pinned down and lose another one of us, and that we can't afford."

"I'm going to move down the ditch to get a better look at it," I said.

I crouched over a bit and moved along the ditch to where I had a better view of the building. It had an ominous look about it and it appeared to be uninhabited. As I started back, my eye suddenly caught a sign of movement.

"A man," I whispered to a trooper posted as a guard on the edge of our group.

We both watched as he slowly made his way toward us. Apparently he was not aware of us. Or was he pretending, sent by the Germans to scout us out? Should I wait until he got, closer and then kill him? We certainly wanted no prisoners.

We were having a hard enough time taking care of ourselves.

On the other hand, if I shot, the sound would give our location away. I decided that it would be best to let him keep coming in and then to jump him. Whether or not to kill him would depend on the situation then. In any event, we didn't intend to make the same mistake that we had made last night, when we let the Italian prisoner escape, and alert, I suppose, the entire damn countryside. But this was a different situation. It was broad daylight and we were not going to make the same mistake twice.

The man kept coming toward us in a wandering pattern, occasionally stopping to kick a stone or clod of dirt. About fifty yards away he stopped, seemed to look in our direction, and then turned and walked away. I doubted that he actually saw us and decided to let him get away. He crossed one hill, then another; until he was out of sight, over the hills and far away.

The Sicilian sun bore down. It was midafternoon, and since the lone man had disappeared over the horizon a couple of hours before, there had been no sign of activity. I had hoped that perhaps some troopers might wander by, or if we were near the coast that the amphibious assault forces would overrun us.

No such luck. Occasional firing could be heard far away and

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sometimes an airplane would be seen high in the sky. But the Sicilian countryside was asleep in the middle of a hot July afternoon. I should have slept. I was dead-tired, but I was too worried to sleep. Where was the regiment of three thousand troopers? What had happened to our well-laid plans? Wasn't there something that one could do besides wait?

There was not. Nothing but to be patient and wait. Wait until dark. I was learning the hard way that the moral responsibilities of command weigh far more heavily on a man than the physical.

And that moral courage is far more important and necessary than physical courage. Physical courage consists simply of one's pride making one do something that is manifestly dangerous.

Moral courage comes from the soul. It can only come from confidence and belief in what one is doing. If I had any, it had to come from my upbringing and from what I had learned as a cadet at West Point.

Ah, West Point. How much simpler battles seemed when fought in the textbooks in the West Academic Building. But the instructors had not misled me. Besides, I had been an instructor in tactics myself. We had talked knowingly of "the fog of war," and the confusion and utter despair that would characterize some of the hours of greatest decision. This I had to remember. I must remember. I must remember West Point, and the days when I first aspired to go there. I must remember and I did remember.

We had landed in Africa early in May, '43, trained for a month, and then started moving toward our takeoff airfields for the Sicilian invasion. By then I was entirely confident that our operation would be successful. We had acquired many new techniques to accomplish reorganization and control after landing and a number of new items of equipment. Well trained, the troops were eager and absolutely sure of themselves when they left for their departure airfields-of such substance is valor born. Now, twenty-four hours later, I surveyed the results of the

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first day's fighting. As well as I could tell, it had been an absolute shambles. The regiment was scattered like chaff in the wind, and then possibly destroyed. I did not know. Could it be that the critics were right-that airborne combat was just so much nonsense?

The Sicilian sun was now low in the sky and soon we would be able to move out. Water was a first need; it was almost gone.

For food we had a few cartons of K-rations and some concentrated things in an "escape kit." An escape kit was a small plastic box, about six inches square and an inch through. It contained the essentials for escape and survival behind enemy lines. In mine was a silk map of Sicily and it was the only map of Sicily that I had. The practice in those days was to take no unnecessary papers or maps, and certainly, under no circumstances, a marked map. We had memorized thoroughly the terrain around our objective and we had been confident that the Air Corps would drop us near the objective. So, why carry a small-scale map?

The escape kit also contained malt tablets, which were very tasty, and pills to keep one from going to sleep. It also contained a rubber-covered piece of a steel saw about five inches long, and a very good small compass about the size of a quarter.

The saw was included so that in the event of imminent capture it could be concealed in one's bottom, later to be withdrawn and provide the means of escape. Looking the gear over, one of the troopers made the observation that there appeared to be clear advantages in being a girl in a situation like this. It did seem so.

But it was nearing time to move. It was getting dark and it must have been about nine o'clock.

It had been a hard day-in a way, one of the hardest days of my life. I ran over in my mind the things that concerned me most. First, there was the inadequacy of our weapons. It is nothing short of homicidal to send American young men into combat with weapons not up to the job that confronts them.

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We needed a more reliable, faster-firing hand weapon than the carbine. And above all, we needed a tank killer for the individual Soldier; otherwise, it would be better to have him stay at home and not go into combat. Inadequately equipped, he is a liability to everyone. Next, training had to be more realistic, so tough and exacting that combat would be a welcome relief.

And while I was not back with my own troopers yet, I felt that I had probably been spared an untimely end by being able to live through this day. If I did survive, I decided that I would never forget the simple fundamentals that I bad learned as a cadet-that I would live by them. And that, if allowed to live, I would take the best possible care of any troops charged to me. And "taking care of them" meant making them into the best fighting organizations possible, that they might survive and win in battle. George Patton's last words to us before we left Morocco came home with meaning: "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country." I turned to Vandervoort.

"Okay, Van, move out. You be the point, just five or ten yards, depending on how black it gets. Stop after going through any ditches or bad obstacles to be sure that we are all through. If we hit a fight, I'm going to try to slide around it, so don't start any shooting unless you have to."

"Ireland, you follow me and stay close with that tommy gun.

If I need you, I'll need you right away. You two troopers follow on the flanks, one on each side and not too far out; be sure that you can see me at all times. Okay, let's go."

And we went.

Into the Sicilian night, heading for what we hoped was Gela, somewhere to the west. It was a relief to be moving instead of sitting and worrying. Sitting and worrying had been the hardest of all and I had done a lot of it.

After about an hour, we were challenged by a small poup of wounded and injured under command of a Lieutenant Klenheim. We traded morphine Syrettes for their M-1 rifles and ammunition

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and continued to the west. About two-thirty, we were challenged by a machine gun post of the 45^th Division and, at last, we had re-entered our own lines. We continued on looking for the 45^th Division CP [command post], engaged some of our own tanks with small-arms fire to their dismay-no one hurt-and kept going. Shortly after daylight, I joined up with about two hundred of the 3^rd Battalion of of the 505^th and we were back in business. We advanced at once toward Gela and by midmorning tangled with the German Herman Goering Division.

This action has been described in some detail in Airborne Warfare and I will only touch upon those aspects of it bearing on the problem of weapons in support of innovations in tactics. In airborne ground combat, the big problem was antitank weapons.

Meeting the Hermann Goering head-on gave us a good opportunity to test our judgment in weapons development, for the Tiger tank with which it was equipped was the most formidable tank roaming the battlefield, not only in 1943 but throughout the war.

The leading unit, an engineer platoon of the 307th Engineers commanded by Lieutenant Ben L. Wechsler, a first-class fighting man, moved toward Gela. He had with him one bazooka with three [ED: 2.36 inch] rockets and one machine gun, in addition to the usual small arms. I joined him and we started up the road. At once the platoon met a blast of small-arms fire. The Germans were astride the road on a ridge to the front. The platoon bored in and drove them off.

When we got to the top, we were pinned down by intense small arms fire that was soon joined by mortar fire. The grand effect sounded as though thousands of bees were playing crack the whip; leaves and branches were falling all over the ridge, and occasionally someone would get hit. We brought up the remainder of the troops and continued to bore in. In no time those wounded, many of them seriously, were working back, all with the same story. The bazooka rockets were bouncing off the tanks and the tanks were then chewing the troopers to pieces. The next day we actually buried some troopers with pieces of bazooka ground into

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them by tank tracks. We captured one tank by grenading the crew when they came out to talk things over a bit too close to a trooper, a Lieutenant Swingler. The tank had four bazooka hits on it, none of which penetrated. We were fortunate that our infantry was far superior to the German infantry, for that saved the day.

The German force was the left column of the Hermann Goering Division attacking the Gela beaches, consisting of:

Panzer Grenadier Regiment 1 (2 Battalions)

1 light Artillery Battalion

1 Tiger Tank Company

In the midst of the fighting, the German Division G-3 went forward to see the situation firsthand and he reported that "The leader of the combat command, Commander of the 1st Panzer Grenadier Regiment, lay with his adjutant under heavy hostile fire and could scarcely lift his head. He lay there an hour already and could not lead." The division commander relieved him of his command that night.

As the day came to an end I gathered all of the troopers that I could get my hands on for one last counterattack. The thought of Shiloh ran through my mind, how a battle was won by simply refusing to give up the battlefield. And I recalled the number of times in a meeting engagement when both sides withdrew after heavy losses on the mistaken assumption that they had lost the fight. Well, we would give it one last go. The Navy was helping with fire support, a company of Sherman [ED: medium] tanks joined us, and just before dusk we jumped off. We caught the Germans in the start of a withdrawal, overran a company of 120mm mortars in position, some tanks and trucks, and captured quite a few prisoners. Best of all we recovered many of our wounded who were scattered about the area of the day's fighting. Darkness came quickly and as we organized for the night, we could see the entire sky off toward the beaches aflame with ack-ack [ED: anti-aircraft guns]. It went on for some time and it was by far the most spectacular display of its type that we had ever seen. As we were admiring it, out of the

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din of the firing a steady drone of oncoming airplanes could be heard. We all grabbed for our rifles and got ready to join in the fun. Within seconds the planes emerged from the holocaust and we recognized their silhouettes in formation; they were our own Troop Carrier planes! Some of them were burning and troopers were beginning to jump from them, some landing on us and some on the Germans. Fortunately the group that I was with recognized them and did not fire on them but went to work trying to help those that they could reach. It had been a tragic mistake that has never been fully explained. Notice of the planned jump had gone out from the higher headquarters but it evidently failed to get down to the gun crews. Besides, the Germans had a bombing run over the fleet just before our planes arrived, and the very night that we were reinforcing by parachute, the Germans were doing the same thing with their 1st Parachute Division in the vicinity of Catania, far to the east. Our losses were twenty-three planes shot down and dozens damaged in varying degrees.

By daylight the next day some semblance of a command was being restored to the troops who had been through the previous day's fighting. The Germans had withdrawn and I pressed patrols toward Gela. We got through the following morning shortly after daylight.

I followed one of the patrols in a jeep [4x4 unarmored truck], red-eyed and tired and carrying an M-1 rifle. There was no sign of the enemy except the dead and a burning tank. I made my way to the 1st Division's command post and there I met General Ridgway. Together we went on to Gela a few miles away. We came to the outlying buildings of the town on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

There, with his pistols on his hips, stood General Patton. He greeted me warmly and with a friendly touch of profanity. It was good to see him.

We went into a nearby farmhouse, where Colonel Bill Darby of the Rangers joined us. I was glad to see Bill. I had remembered hearing him describe how he planned to scale the cliffs and capture Gela before we went in. It had sounded crazy to me. I

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now learned that when he heard what we had planned for the parachutists he thought we were crazy too. Each to his own. We assembled the division at Gela and went on to the west.

The heaviest fighting for us was over.

The Battle of Sicily came to an end in late August of 1943. We knew that we had had a rough time of it and some hard fighting but we were less certain about what we had accomplished. It was with some satisfaction therefore that we read a German evaluation of the action after the war had come to an end. General Karl Student, who commanded the German airborne assault on Crete, upon being interrogated in a British prisoner-of-war camp in October, 1945, said:

The development of airborne doctrine and following it through from concept to combat had been a fascinating experience. It also had been a sobering one. Many of the ideas of the laboratory and classroom were found inadequate in the holocaust of battle.

Vision, tempered by the caution that comes from practical experience, is extremely important in research. And equally important is the courage to make early decisions leading to advanced weapons systems in the future. Tardy decision-making is a luxury we can no longer afford.

In their postwar account of the Sicilian fighting, the Germans reported their first capture of a bazooka. They sent it back to Germany, tested it, found its defects and corrected them, and went into production on an improved model. When we landed in Normandy less than a year later, we were met with a large bazooka, about 3.5 inches in diameter. [Panzerschrek] We were still equipped

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with the small 2.36-inch size. As a matter of fact, our infantry was still equipped with the 2.36-inch bazooka seven years later, in July of 1950, when it was attacked by Russian T-34 [medium] tanks manned by the North Koreans. They reported then, once again, that the rockets were bouncing off the tanks. We had had a big bazooka in development for some years. General Ridgway, who was an Army Deputy Chief of Staff in the summer of 1950, had production stepped up at once and new bazookas and ammunition were flown directly from the factory doors to the combat area. They contributed as much as any single factor to the survival of the 8^th Army. But the laggardness in the decision-making and processes of research and development that caused that situation to occur seems to be almost inherent in our military programs, and I refer to the programs of all of the services. There are numerous examples of weapons, or their systems' components, being delayed or disapproved because the individuals who have funding control, do not, or simply will not, understand the need of the fighting man in the field.

Before leaving the Mediterranean, we were to jump into Salerno. In the few weeks' respite that followed Salerno, we sought to correct the troubles that plagued us the night of the Sicilian, landings. A small experimental group was established at Comiso, Airfield in Sicily. It was under the control of Colonel John Norton of the Army and Colonel Joe Crouch of the Air Corps. Work was started at once on improving the accuracy of delivery of paratroopers. In a few weeks they submitted recommendations that we adopted, techniques which are still being used today. Pathfinder teams, consisting of carefully selected, well-trained battle veterans, were organized to jump into combat well ahead of the main landings. They were to carry navigational aids to assist the Troop Carrier pilots. About this time the Air Corps brought over the first airborne radar that we had seen. I took a number of flights over the Mediterranean to observe its work and was delighted with the prospect of improved navigation that it offered our pilots.

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The problem of antitank weapons was more difficult. The only effective ones in existence were quite heavy, so heavy that they had to be taken into combat by glider. Since all of our combat operations were necessarily carried out under cover of darkness, we had to develop night-landing techniques for glider pilots.

Drawing upon reports of night-landing exercises back in the United States, we established an experimental unit in Sicily. After several weeks of work, we staged a demonstration of our system.

Senior airborne and troop carrier officers were flown in from Africa and Italy to see it. Tragically-and I did not realize it was happening at the time-substitute pilots were used the night of the demonstration and we succeeded in demonstrating the utter impossibility of attempting such a thing at night. Gliders were scattered all over the nearby Sicilian hills and farmhouses, most of them badly damaged, but fortunately few pilots were hurt.

While these things were going on, we gave much attention to new methods of control immediately following landing, new types of orders, simpler ways of reorganizing, all for the purpose of readying ourselves for the inevitable next jump wherever it would be. It was to be in Normandy six months later.

I arrived in London in November, 1943, and went to work with the COSSACK staff. Several years later, in Airborne Warfare, I described the problems of the forthcoming battle as we saw them then. Airborne operations...are, for the opposing commanders and staffs, keen contests of wits and ingenuity. The possible area of operations is

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1. Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Command.

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vast and normally encompasses many thousands of square miles. The airborne targets and take-off airfields may be separated by hundreds of miles yet be within a few minutes or a few hours striking time.

The commander who intends to attack marshals his troop-carrier aircraft and shifts his airborne troops with as much attention to a cover plan for deceit as to the actual assault plan itself.

On the other side, defensive troops are hidden and exposed, and moved and countermoved. Anti-airborne obstacles are prepared to destroy the attackers; worthless but sinister facsimiles are prepared to scare them off. Good landing areas are totally neutralized by passive anti-airborne defensive measures, while others, equally as good or better, are left untouched to lure the assaulting airborne troops into organized and defended traps where they can be destroyed by well concealed weapons.

Thus in such situations there are two conditions that make airborne combat, in its broader aspects, markedly different from other types of fighting. First, the defender can prepare active and passive measures against an attack with comparative immunity from detection. Second, an airborne assault, once it is under way, is beyond immediate relief, alteration of direction, or even succor. The battle, when finally joined, is the payoff.

We were constantly preoccupied with three things, the plan, the enemy and our resources. The control of the latter was out of our hands and we had to depend upon the means shipped to us from the United States and from the Mediterranean.

Discussions of the proposed plan brought to light for the first time an unprecedented situation, and yet one common to the development of a new idea. We now began to meet with such enthusiasm for airborne operations, and from sources heretofore quite skeptical, that we had to caution them of the risks present in that type of combat. I remember talking to a senior officer, who, upon hearing one of the plans described, said to me: "Why man, it's like sending Michelangelo to paint a barn. Why jump so near the beaches? Make a deep penetration-hell, go all the way to Paris." A staff team from the Pentagon actually did come over with a proposal that we make the airborne landings in the Orleans Gap, not far from Paris. What in the world they thought we would use

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against the Panzer Divisions goodness knows. But it is an interesting phenomenon that I have observed frequently, that those most reluctant to accept a new idea are often the first to yell "laggard" after the idea has been proven. As one writer has expressed it, "When it appears that the new idea is finding favour with the authorities and that adherence is likely to acquire merit, converts quickly appear; and they, like converts to a new religion, forgetting their former derision and opposition, soon become more fanatical than those who evolved the idea." [2] . The plans proposed to us ranged from jumping small teams of parachutists on all of the coastal weapons to penetrations a hundred miles deep. We finally settled upon a simple but effective plan of using the British division on the extreme left to capture crossings over the River Orne, and using the American divisions to (a) seize the causeways from the beaches inland and (b) block the movement of German reinforcements toward the beaches.

Knowing how close we had come to disaster in Sicily, and realizing that I was going to jump into Normandy, I probably had stronger feelings about the forthcoming battle than most of the staff in London. I studied the enemy with meticulous care and pored over air photographs. He gave us much to think about.

Hardly had our final plans been drafted when countermeasures began to appear in the photographs. Rommelspargel (Rommel's asparagus) began to spring up overnight in many of the proposed landing areas. These were poles about six to twelve inches in diameter and eight to twelve feet long. They were sunk a foot or two into the ground and stood about seventy-five to one hundred feet apart. Soon improvements began to show up; the poles were being wired together, then mines seemed to be affixed to the wires. Machine-gun emplacements began to appear around some of the proposed drop zones, and fields-of-fire were cleared.

Much of the photography gave us accurate locations of German headquarters and scattered ammunition and gasoline dumps.

Concurrently, intense training was conducted and we received

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two new parachute regiments directly from the United States.

They were enthusiastic and their junior officers were overflowing with energy and drive. How to condition them mentally and physically for the shock that lay ahead was the problem. American young men are so removed from battle experience that they think of combat in terms of athletic competitions, and thus in terms of sportsmanship. It almost takes the sight of a friend being killed by an enemy weapon for them to realize that it could happen to them. Physical stamina and personal bravery were present in abundance, but the cold, calculating stealth of the killer had to be given them. And the officers had to learn the clear-headedness and moral courage to make decisions under great stress; one took for granted their physical courage.

In training, profiting from my Sicilian experience, I resorted to a technique that I have often used since. All maneuvers in which decisions were required were preceded by a long grueling physical test, usually an overnight march of about eighteen to twenty miles with full combat equipment. Then when the men expected a rest, they were presented with difficult combat situations. After an all-day maneuver, when they were tired and hungry, a night march was ordered. After a couple of hours of marching, at about midnight, they would be ordered to halt and go into a dispersed bivouac, in anticipation of a night's rest. After about an hour of sleep, which was just enough to cause them to lose their sense of orientation to events and environment, unit commanders were suddenly awakened and given a new set of orders requiring immediate movement. They marched until daylight, when a new situation was given to them, usually a final attack order. In the meantime a daylight inspection was made of their bivouac to check whether or not they had lost equipment, etc. It was exacting training, but it gave me an opportunity to get to know a lot about them and for them to learn much about themselves. During such exercises we used enemy uniforms, weapons and live ammunition quite freely. Even so, rarely could the training be exacting enough to compare to the shock of battle itself, and the para-

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trooper unfortunately meets the shock head on in seconds, rather than via the gradual approach to battle on foot, as so often is the situation with our other troops.

As spring came to England and our training intensified we began to hear of something new- "V" weapons. A conference was called of the senior commanders in London and they were given as much information as was available. It wasn't very much. We knew that the enemy had a new, long-range, supersonic rocket with a big high-explosive warhead that could be used against the area where our troops were billeted. At least we understood that it could, but the measures we were taking had, of necessity, to be passive. We made plans to disperse our troops in trenches if a bombardment of rockets occurred.

Actually, the British had been following the German rocket program for some time. Major Duncan Sandys was Chairman of the Flying Bomb Counter Measures Committee, and in the spring of 1943 he began to urge that additional photo reconnaissance be made of Peenemunde, the German missile development center.

His efforts were rewarded and on the eighteenth of June, 1943, photography showed long slender objects in an emplacement that he deduced to be a very long-range rocket. He had some difficulty convincing the RAF but finally, after much discussion, that summer the first air attack on Peenemunde took place. The Germans then moved their test firings to Poland. Here the Polish Underground began to co-operate with the British. The first V-2 was fired in January of '44. The Poles reported to the British how it destroyed several cottages at a distance of nearly two hundred miles from the town of Blizna. Not all of the V-2s were completely successful and many of them detonated at distances not much more than fifty to sixty miles from the launching site. Although the Germans attempted to recover the fragments, the Polish Underground collected many of them. As a British officer personally concerned with the problem described the situation:

from time to time essential parts such as turbocompressors, fuel reservoirs, rudder chains and electrical equipment were captured. Later

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the "scatter" became less, not more than 10 miles. This was very helpful to the Germans and equally unhelpful to the Poles, who might quite reasonably have, at this point, given up the unequal struggle. But their patience, skill and courage had its reward. One of the rockets dropped on the bank of the River Bug and did not explode. This was near the village of Sarmaki where some of the "Underground" were active.

These men reached the spot in time to roll the weapon into the water and by various common-sense devices, such as watering large numbers of cattle upstream of the V-2, made the water so muddy that the German search-parties failed in their intention. That night the Poles fished the weapon out of the water and in great stealth dismantled it and removed the vital parts. Later it was flown to England by a DC-3 that made a night rendezvous with the Polish underground. [5]

In the meantime, the Germans began their spasmodic V-1 (a subsonic winged bomb) launchings against England. They preceded their effort by an elaborate construction program and by December of 1943 approximately a hundred launching sites were in advance stage of construction. On December 20 the Allied Air Forces launched an all-out attack on the sites and by April of '44 almost all of them were badly damaged or completely destroyed.

The Germans then devised a mobile system, readily transportable and difficult to detect. Although we did not know it at the time, they were having a heated internal dispute between their scientists, airmen and Soldiers. Dr. von Braun recounted the story in his testimony before a committee of the United States Senate on December 17, 1957:

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Mobile V-2 SSMs launched from transporter, erector launchers (TELs)

Redstone SSM in tactical use with the U.S. Army

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4. Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs. Hearings before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, 85^th Congress.

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Training in preparation for Normandy continued and a final full-scale rehearsal was staged in May of 1944. It was conducted at night under approximately the conditions we anticipated on D-Day. The takeoff was normal, we got most of the division into the air and then found that we could not get it down. Fog and bad weather closed in on us, the drop zones could not be located, and close troop carrier formations could not be flown. A few drops were made but most of the troops had to be air-landed at airdromes scattered over England. The few unit jumps that were made, combined with the many months of intense training behind us, were considered adequate for the job ahead and no additional rehearsals were attempted.

We continued to follow the German defensive preparations and to our surprise, in late May, a German division was moved into the very area into which we were to land. These combined with the pattern of Rommelspargel caused many of us to suspect that the Germans knew of our exact plans. Plans were changed and we moved the drop zones several miles to the east. Recalling the German propaganda effort that was so successful prior to our landing in Sicily, I went to see the Chief of Psychological Warfare, in General Eisenhower's headquarters and urged that he print and drop a leaflet to the French to counter the German effort. After some explanation, he convinced me that it could boomerang.

The Germans could duplicate it and use it against us by merely changing some of the wording, so the idea was dropped.

By early June all was ready, as ready as we could make it. The anticipated V-weapons did not attack the troop areas, the troops were trained, they were bivouacked around the airfields, ammunition, orders and maps were issued, and we were ready for takeoff.

I continued to worry about tanks, but we were taking along twelve, antitank guns in gliders that were going to attempt to land with us at night. They would help.

June 5-6 was a good night for an operation and while there appeared to be some apprehension about the high winds, to those of us who had been in Sicily, it was of little concern. Take-

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offs were normal, and until we entered a dense fog bank soon after we crossed the Coast of France, all went well. I was flying in the lead plane, as commander of a task force of three parachute regiments, and looking back it was a most reassuring sight. At that moment, as so often happens in combat, everything seemed to go wrong. Within seconds everything changed and there wasn't an airplane to be seen. From the moment we crossed the Coast of "," France we had twelve minutes in which to make the jump decision; after that deadline we would have crossed the whole Cherbourg Peninsula and have been over the ocean again. At eight minutes, the fog began to dissipate, the flak and small-arms fire thickened, the green light went on, and with one last precious look at the layout of the land below, we went out. What followed, allthough a bedlam in many respects, was far better than Sicily, and by daylight I had about 125 troopers under my control. I managed to regain control of additional units, get close to our first objective, and at the end of the first day's fighting, General Matt Ridgway joined me at a railroad overpass about five miles west of the town of Ste.-Mere-Eglise.

"Jim," he said, "how are things going?" ""All right, 1 guess," I said. 'We have had very heavy fighting and 1 have lost a couple of battalion commanders as well as quite a few troopers. We have not been able to get our first objective [a bridge over the Merderet River], but we are holding our own.

Tanks at the bridge site are giving us a difficult time." "Well," he said, "1 have heard rumors that the amphibious landings did not come in on account of weather. We may have a hard time of it." We discussed this a bit further and decided, as far as possible, to keep it from the troops and to make the best of things.

Fortunately, the amphibious landing did come in on schedule, with the heavy equipment that we so badly needed. Soon we attacked across the Merderet River overrunning the German positions. We captured our first big bazooka. It was exactly like ours except that it appeared to be about twice the size. I also found

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boxes of rocket-like objects with the name "Faustpetrone" lettered upon them. I had no idea what they were and could not imagine how they might be used. They appeared to be oversized German potato-masher grenades. Later I was to learn that they were a new form of rocket, built on a German application of the principle of our bazooka ammunition. In a few months, we captured a more advanced type labeled, "Panzerfaust." Translated it means "armored fist." It consisted of a warhead about six inches in diameter fired with a small rocket charge from a small tube. The warhead remained, like an onion on the end of a stem, outside the tube. Later, in combat in Holland, the German directions were translated into English and distributed to our troops. We captured as many Panzerfausts as we possibly could and carried them with us.

Captured Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades: Secret of Paratrooper Success in WW2

Though considerably shorter in range than the bazookas, they were the parachutist's best antitank weapons and we were grateful to the Germans for having developed them. Soon we found them useful in close infantry combat as well. Colonel Reuben Tucker's 504^th Parachute Infantry captured a truckload that they kept with them until the end of the war.

After thirty-three days of fighting in Normandy, the division was relieved. There is no doubt now that the three airborne divisions had contributed decisively to the success of the operation, but it had been costly. Of the 11,770 troops of the 82^nd Airborne Division committed to the battle, only 6,545 were returned with us to England. Officer casualties were particularly high, especially in the infantry regiments, ranging from 52 percent in the lowest to 63 per cent in the highest. But the airborne attack had succeeded and the opportunities were now beginning to appear unlimited, provided we could get adequate airlift and further improve our methods.

As soon as we returned to England we sent back to the United States for technical assistance in solving the assembly and reorganization problems immediately following landing. The request went to the office of Dr. Vannevar Bush and he sent over Dr. Charles E. Waring. [ED: a civilian scientist that knew technology's possibilities and hadn't proved his manhood by being in the military---yet his contributions were vital by the non-snob Gavin] Dr. Waring worked closely with us for

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the remainder of the war developing infrared assembly lights, scanners and equipment to make possible their use with pathfinder teams. At the same time, we studied the interrogation reports of over a thousand German officers and enlisted men with whom we had been in contact immediately following the landing.

Our purpose was to find out what they knew about our airborne operations, what measures they had taken to defend against them and their plans for defense in the future. There is no doubt that they had done an excellent job of preparing their troops for the airborne attack, even though we defeated them. An excellent booklet, "What Every Soldier Should Know about Airborne Troops", had been printed and distributed. Numerous training exercises had been conducted on a realistic basis. The troops had been impressed with the "no quarter given" type fighting that they might expect from the parachutists and they were prepared for it. All in all, it appeared that our next airborne assault would meet stiffer opposition unless the Wehrmacht was disintegrating. This, however, it appeared to be doing.

"End the war in forty-four," was the hope. It seemed possible of attainment. By late August the Germans were reeling back into Germany and there appeared to be nothing in prospect that would save them except possibly our own mistakes. We planned one airborne jump in Tournai, Belgium, and then had to cancel it at the last moment because the Germans were falling back too rapidly. We then planned the Eindhoven-Nijmegen-Arnhem jump.

It was known as Operation "Market-Garden." Operation "Market-Garden" was intended to break the back of German resistance and bring the war to an end in '44. If it succeeded, Montgomery's Second Army would reach the North Sea, thus cutting off major German formations and placing us in a position to strike into the heart of Germany. As Montgomery expressed it, "My own view was that one powerful, full-blooded thrust across the Rhine and into the Heart of Germany, backed by the whole of the resources of the Allied Armies, would be likely to achieve decisive results." Actually, there was a basic

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conflict in strategy. Montgomery believed in defending along most of the front using a single main thrust to make a decisive penetration to the heart of Germany, in the north. General Eisenhower was more inclined to a broad-front approach and General Patton wanted to make a single all-out effort in his area in the south. The decision made was a compromise. Based on a conversation of General Eisenhower on September 5, 1944, the Chief of Military History reports:

The Supreme Commander, while giving priority to Montgomery's advance to the northeast, thought it important to get "Patton moving again so that we may be fully prepared to carry out the original conception for the final stages of the campaign." As he saw it at the time, the logical move was to take advantage of all existing lines of communications in the advance toward Germany and to bring the southern wing of the OVERLORD forces on the Rhine at Koblenz. At the same time, airborne forces would be used to seize crossings over the Rhine thus placing the Allies in a position to thrust deep into the Ruhr and threaten Berlin. . . . None of Eisenhower's executives liked the compromise but their complaints were not so loud at the moment as they be, came in later months, and years, when each felt that he had been deprived of victory in consequence of that decision. Patton called it .

"the most momentous error of the war." [5]

Somehow the decision was made to give Montgomery the ball, but to keep Patton happy, he was allowed to carry one too but with not as much support as Montgomery. Patton didn't like it General Bradley says that Patton came to his headquarters ''bellowing like a bull," roaring, "To hell with Hodges and Monty. We'll win your goddam war if you'll keep the Third Army going." The operation was carried out on September 17, 1944. The British First Parachute Division landed at Arnhem, the 82^nd Airborne Division about twenty miles south at Nijmegen, and the 101^st Airborne Division was farther south at Eindhoven. The 101^st was the first to link up. The fighting was quite heavy. The British Guards Division linked up with the 82^nd on the morning of September 19. On the twenty-first the big bridge at Nijmegen was

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5. "How The Allies Let Victory Slip in 1944," Captain Liddell Hart, Marine Corps Gazette, July, 1957.

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in our hands and the British armor was advancing toward Arnhem. By then, the Germans had cut our long tenuous route extending back into Belgium at several places. Tragically, both an American and a British officer, contrary to the standing orders of both airborne divisions, carried with them copies of the complete battle orders and these soon fell into German hands. I am inclined to believe that without this information, even though Field Marshal Montgomery lacked adequate strength, the objective of the operation would have been realized. The North Sea would have been reached and the scene set for ending the war in the fall of 1944. Reacting promptly, however, with the information of our own plans in their hands, the Germans strongly attacked across the long road up to the airhead. Soon the momentum of the entire attack was brought to a halt. With an additional corps of three divisions on land, or a single additional airborne division in the airhead, Field Marshal Montgomery could have accomplished his objective. As it was, for lack of adequate airlift only part of each of the divisions was flown in the first day, and bad weather detained the remainder of the lift for a critical period of time. Thus greater airlift could also very likely have contributed decisively to the success of the operation.

To those of us in the battle the lack of divisional combat strength and lack of airlift was obvious. Both Montgomery and Patton were apparently making an effort, in the north and in the south, but neither had adequate strength and neither was successful. Somehow, the decision behind this attack stuck in my mind in a very bothersome way, for it epitomizes the problem of generalship in a democracy. Generalship in a democracy is rife with compromise. It should be of concern to our military students and our combat leaders of tomorrow. By mid-'44, most of our military decisions were being made on the basis of absolute certainty not to fail; ultimate success appeared inevitable and could wait. This attitude seemed to permeate the lowest of commands, and venturesome, skillful tactical schemes were rare indeed. Methodical phase-line-by

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phase-line attacks were preferred. The thought often occurred to me that a "Stonewall" Jackson would have been given short shrift as a tactical commander. He probably would have been relieved for falling back or giving up ground. I am not unmindful of the spectacular achievements of General Patton. We need more General Pattons. I would feel better about future military relations with the Soviet Union and its satellites if we had more like him. But innovations in applied tactics, and in combat behavior and leadership, are as rare as innovations in concepts and research.

But winter came and still no peace. On December 17, 1944, I was the acting commander of the VIII Corps and I was with the 82^nd Airborne Division at Sissone, France. That evening I received an alert of a move to the front where the Germans were doing unexpectedly well. After getting the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Divisions in motion, I left for Spa, Belgium, to report to the commanding general of the U.S. First Army. He was General Hodges and I met him in his office at about ten in the morning.

His chief of staff, General Bill Kean, was there as well as the Army G-3, General Thorson. The enemy situation was vague, to say the least, and the corps that I commanded was on the way by truck toward Bastogne, an obviously important road center in Belgium. The problem was what to do with the corps. It was the last uncommitted Allied reserve. General Kean ran his finger over the map and suggested Bastogne for one division and Werbemont for the other. General Hodges approved. Since the 82^nd was leading I ordered it to continue on to Werbemont and after making a reconnaissance of that locality, I went on to Bastogne.

The VIII Corps had its headquarters in a school in Bastogne and there was considerable confusion and much doubt about the situation. The VIII Corps was pulling back and they did not have much information to offer. Just before dusk the commanding general of the 101st arrived, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, and I gave him what information I had. I then gave him his orders "to organize and defend the locality". His orders were clear, he was

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to stay there unless told otherwise. His gallant defense with a great division, the 101^st Airborne, is now history. Immediately after issuing him his orders, I went north to join the 82^nd and in about twenty-four hours General Ridgway arrived to reassume command of the corps. Then followed one of the bitterest periods of fighting of the war.

The first signs of spring were in the air when we reached the Roer River. Spring was most welcome. It had been a cold and costly winter. Our casualties had been heavy and the fighting at times very difficult. With the coming of spring came rumors of a spring offensive. The hardened veterans no longer talked about ending the war, then or later, and if there had been a favorite slogan, it would have been, "Stay alive in Forty-five." I remember a remark made by a senior British officer in a meeting that I attended. He and most of his troops were veterans of the desert fighting and, at the time of our meeting, an attack that he had planned with great care was making absolutely no progress.

Speaking wistfully of it he said, "Ah, if only I had one good green division." The 82^nd Airborne Division was withdrawn and preparations

were made for another airborne operation. It was to be a jump on Berlin. This was to be the kill, and while a bit apprehensive about our prospects in another daylight jump, we knew that this would be the last, in Europe anyway. Maps were issued, orders prepared and all of the details carefully checked. It was to be a three-division effort, two American and one British. The American sector, as it turned out, was approximately the same sector that we were to occupy after the war ended. It was the southwestern portion of the city, including Tempelhof Airdrome.

Once again I went back to studying all available intelligence with care. I read the RAF and Air Corps daily digests as well as the Army reports. The antiaircraft gun deployments around our approach routes to the city appeared to be less impressive than they had been in Holland, near Nijmegen. Our estimate was that we could take care of them. There was something else, however,

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that began to show up in the pilot interrogation reports that bothered me. I remember reading of it first in an RAF post-flight interrogation report. It was a story about what appeared to be a rocket or missile. One of the digests contained a picture of the flaming, corkscrew-like path of one of them in flight. Some of the pilots reported that it appeared to home on the plane and if they attempted evasive action it seemed to change course and follow them. There was much speculation but unfortunately very little factual information except a few pilot reports. If it were a homing missile, its use in numbers would be disastrous to us. My hope therefore was that it was still in development and would not be available in numbers before our proposed Berlin operation. But our concern was soon brought to an end by the cancellation of the Berlin jump. We returned to ground combat.

We were placed in a sector along the Rhine River near Cologne.

It was a quiet area except for Colonel Tucker's 504^th Parachute Infantry, which made a river crossing and did some very heavy fighting near the small town of Hitdorf. In late April we were on the move again, this time to the Elbe River far to the north, in the area of the British Second Army. Soon we were to meet the Russian forces then storming across northern Germany. I shall always remember the meeting of our forces for a number of reasons. The 82^nd Airborne Division was under the command of the British Second Army. The Army Commander was General Sir Miles Dempsey, a brilliant and at the same time quietly efficient, modest type of British officer, who to my mind was one of the great Soldiers of the war. The 82^nd Airborne Division was strung back in trucks over the roads to Cologne for almost a couple of hundred miles. [ED: just as pre-war games showed would happen to road-bound vehicles] The head of the column was just below Hamburg near the town of Bleckede on the Elbe River. Directly to the north about sixty miles away was the Baltic Sea. I had made an early reconnaissance of the Elbe River line and it appeared that the German build-up on the far side was heavier than usual.

The river was very wide and running swiftly in spring flood. I had

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about two battalions of infantry up and the remainder would arrive during the night. The prudent thing would have been to wait twenty-four hours at least before attempting the crossing.

General Dempsey and General Ridgway came to my CP to talk about the situation. I had fought in General Dempsey's army in Holland for over six weeks and I had great respect for his judgment and ability. He asked: "Jim, when do you think you can cross? I would like to get established on the far bank as quickly as possible."

"I have some engineers and light assault boats up as well as about two battalions of infantry," I said. "I am not sure what is on the far side, but the high dikes along the river seem to be well-organized for defense and I have seen quite a few German troops digging in. I would like to get a chance to bring up more troops and delay for about twenty-four hours on the crossing. The river, as you know, is very wide and running very swiftly and it 'will not be an easy one."

Also notice, it doesn't take "special" training to sit your ass on a seat in the back of an amtrack despite usmc propaganda to the contrary.

The atomic bomb overshadowed all military thinking during the period 1945 to 1955. Especially was this true early in the decade. Hiroshima was fresh in our minds, the Soviets had no atomic bomb and no immediate prospect of getting one, and a revolution in military technology suddenly was being thrust upon us. To some extent, military thinking seemed to be paralyzed, by the bomb, and the lessons of World War II were ignored or quickly forgotten. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that after Hiroshima, it was a time to "throw the books out the window." Military texts had to be rewritten. Little that we had learned in World War II, it was said, would have meaningful application in the future. Any historian could have told us that this was nonsense, for there was much to learn from World War II, much of it of immediate value in dealing with our national defense problems, which were soon to become critical. We were fortunate in World War II. We were provided with a shield of time, space and, to a degree, circumstance, that protected us as we readied ourselves. The Atlantic and then the Pacific Ocean provided a physical barrier not easy to cross. In Europe our allies took the brunt of the first blow, recoiled under

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severe punishment, and finally held. The British fought valiantly at home, on the seas, and in North Africa. Despite this, when war reached us we were not ready, neither the Army nor the Navy nor the nation as a whole. This is not to say that we did not respond energetically and completely, for the record shows clearly that we did; but we were not ready, and never again can we afford not to be.

Our nation has always been slow to arouse itself from the idyls of peace. The avoidance of foreign entanglements has been the keystone of policy and it has been with reluctance that we have sent our sons to fight on foreign soil. The problem of political leadership, therefore, can be a most difficult one, as the political careers of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt will show.

As late as the presidential campaign of 1940, Mr. Roosevelt was holding forth to the electorate a promise of nonparticipation in foreign war- "Your sons are not going to be sent to any foreign wars," and "You can nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as a deliberate untruth." Even Congress, always a barometer of grass-roots attitudes, had difficulty in passing the Selective Service Act. It did so by one vote late in the summer of 1941. World War I should have taught us that millions of men cannot spring to arms overnight, and that the American tradition of the frontiers man leaving his plow, grabbing his musket and going off to war has long been outdated.

By World War II the Royal Air Force had already established itself as an independent military organization, and as we entered the war, the U.S. Army Air Corps was given a marginal degree of independence, a promissory note of full independence that would follow the war. In a way, this independence was tied to the soundness of the Douhet theory, for if Douhet were not valid and if the airman did not have a degree of operational independence and a decision-making capability in his own medium, what reason was there for a separate air force? The proponents of a separate air arm sought, therefore, from the mid-thirties to procure the validity, of the Douhet philosophy. The opponents were few and passive.

Much of the judgment on the contribution made by air power was far from objective. Yet if there ever was a time when we needed objectivity and an understanding of the most useful combat function of the airplane, 1945 was the time; for that was the year of the birth of the atomic bomb.

The advent of the atomic bomb appeared to fully validate the Doubet school of thought. Here was a weapon to bring about offensive air strikes that were utterly devastating, and without comparison in human history. The advocates of Douhet pointed to the Strategic Air Command and its combat record as irrefutable evidence of the superiority of the Douhet concept. Actually, if we were to plot a line reflecting, by its rise and fall, the effectiveness of the Douhet concept, we would find that it was at the peak of its validity when first propounded, in the 1920's. At that time,

___________________________________________________________________

3. Time, July 28, 1941.

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there was no defense in prospect against manned aircraft attack resolutely delivered. Gradually, however, the primitive defenses improved. Interceptors and antiaircraft artillery made heavy.

bomber strikes more and more costly. The Luftwaffe was the first to learn that there is more to air power than an all-out bombing offensive. The British had foreseen the value of the interceptor, and so the world's greatest manned aircraft battle, the Battle of Britain, was decided in their favor. When the German Panzer Divisions reached the English Channel, all that stood between them and the decision in land battle that they sought was the defensive power of the Royal Air Force.

Schweinfurt was another test case. The Schweinfurt factories produced ball bearings, vital to the continued German war effort. We made two great bombing attacks on Schweinfurt in the fall of 1943. Reported an observer:

As the war came to an end, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was appointed to move in the wake of the advancing armies and assess the results of our bombing effort. The findings were reported in over two hundred detailed reports. They were never, in my opinion, given the recognition that they deserved. One of the most interesting aspects of our bombing effort was that German production increased in the same ratio as our bombing effort until late in 1944-until "well after the ground armies were ashore to make good the job at which the airplanes had been unsuccessful." [5] The foregoing is not to say that air power did not make a contribution to victory. Quite the contrary, air power was the most

_________________________________________________________

4. Arms and Men, Walter Millis.

5. Ibid.

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significant entity of our war power in World War II. Without it, we never could have established ourselves on the Normandy Peninsula, and we might not have established ourselves in southern Europe. But air power was most effective as a component of our over-all war power, not as an independent entity:

This dumping of enormous quantities of high explosive directly upon civilian homes, factories, power and communications facilities, and upon the cowering people who lived in or manned them, was perhaps the most striking feature of the Second War; it produced ruins more vast and somber than those of antiquity, of a kind which civilized man had never expected to see again. But if it was the machines most gruesome and dramatic contribution to warfare, it was by no means militarily the most significant. The combination of the tank and the tactical airplane continued to dominate most theaters down to the d" [6] en .

This great expansion was possible only because of the excellent National Guard and the organized Reserves. And to my mind, one of the truly great contributions of the prewar system was the ROTC. An army is not one mite better than its leaders, and without the ROTC we would never have had the leaders that we needed so badly. I have known thousands of young ROTC officers in battle and out, and I consider that the nation owes them a

___________________________________________________________________

10. Military Heritage of America, Colonel R. E. Dupuy and Colonel T. N. Dupuy.

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great debt of gratitude. It does not take a long memory to recall the troubles the ROTC had in continuing the support of its program between the wars. Frequently the object of campus puns, it was not appreciated until war came; but when war did come, the ROTC came through. In addition to the ROTC, both the Army and the Navy had an extensive service school system that contributed directly to the capability of the services to grow rapidly.

When the war came to an end, the services were faced with a problem perhaps more serious than that at the beginning. The Navy shrank from a strength of three and one-third million men in 1945 to less than a million in 1946. Ships had to be decommissioned and mothballed, bases and facilities closed down and stocks disposed of all over the world. The Army, from a strength of eight and one-quarter million in 1945, was reduced to less than two million in 1946.

The system of demobilizing the Army, known as the "point system," deserves a word. It was based upon allowing an individual to leave the service when he acquired sufficient points, which in turn were based upon length of service, days of combat, decorations, etc. From a scientific point of view, it appeared to be sound and the troopers expressed a preference for it. However, it came close to destroying the military establishment. The system was put into operation at a time when the administrative burden was the greatest ever known in the history of the United States Army. At first, when only the few very high-point men left, the impact was not seriously felt. Soon, however, it began to cut into the very muscle and bone of the organization. I should add, at this point, that the buck had been passed down to the field and unit commanders, who were informed that they could retain an individual otherwise eligible to leave if he was considered essential ;f' to the functioning of his organization. It takes little imagination to see how that worked.

When Private Jones's number came up, he wanted to go and no one could justify to him his "essentiality." He had been receiving dozens of letters from home about the return of the other

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heroes of the neighborhood, many of whom had presumably joined the service after he had, and his family just didn't understand why he didn't come back. Was it that he really didn't want to? You couldn't tell them that he was essential to the war effort now that the war was over; they knew better than that. Soon the telegrams and letters began to come from members of Congress and, surprisingly, letters came down the command chain from higher headquarters asking for an explanation as to why Private Jones was essential. The very headquarters that conceived the system and authorized exceptions now demanded to know why they were being made. Troop commanders quickly learned that there was but one thing to do-when a man's number came up, out he went. He went whether he was ready to go or not. It was the only sensible thing to do. In the meantime, organizations were rapidly being deprived of their key officers and noncommissioned officers, cooks, clerks, mechanics, and even medical personnel. Thousands of Soldiers were in paper organizations awaiting return to the United States, with no officers that they knew in charge of them and with officers who did not know what they were in charge of. We were not demobilizing the Army, we were absolutely destroying it, and the Communists encouraged it. It was an experience withou~ precedent for the regulars who were to stay, and frequently it taxed their abilities beyond any of the demands of the combat that they had just been through.

At about this time, the Doolittle Board began to look into the abuses of the so-called "caste" system. A Board of General Officers was appointed by the Department of the Army to travel about, and inquire into the low morale of the Army. A committee of outstanding jurists was appointed in Washington to look into the manual of courts martial to rid it of the abuses that, presumably, had been perpetuated during the war. Looking back, I am amazed that any army existed at all at the end of that period. From the viewpoint of the lower unit troop commanders, it was the most shocking and wrong thing that we have ever done in the history of our army-to demobilize it in such an irresponsible manner.

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Little wonder that there were so many abuses, boards and investigations. Little wonder that there was hardly any army left.

B. THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF AIR MOBILITY

C-47s drop Gavin's Paratroopers over Normandy on D-Day

It would seem, from all of the foregoing, that there could not have been much attention given to the lessons of the war. Nevertheless, there was considerable. The outstanding lesson to those of us in the airborne business was the growing importance of air mobility. We saw the Germans, in the Mediterranean, accomplish with one air-transported division a combat task that would have taken half a dozen infantry divisions. This occurred when they poised the German First Parachute Division at Marseilles at the time that we threatened to land in Sicily. Not knowing whether the landing would take place in Italy, Sardinia, Sicily or Corsica, and not having adequate reserves for all of those localities, they gave air mobility to the one division that they did have, and it was a very fine division indeed. We, too, had used air mobility to fly a division back and forth from Africa to Sicily and then to commit it to Salerno to tip the scales of battle in our favor. We had used air mobility to fly a division from England to the continent at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. We had used air mobility to resupply Bastogne and to supply General Patton's fast-moving 3^rd Army. In fact, I have no doubt whatsoever that with half again as much air mobility we could have won the war in 1944 and occupied Berlin first.

Finding the means, and developing the techniques, to achieve efficient air mobility was the big challenge in the wake of World War II. It meant more than merely acquiring additional aircraft. It meant completely redesigning and streamlining the equipment of the airborne division, as well as re-equipping the Troop Carrier units of our Air Force.

Some of these lessons were summarized in Airborne Warfare, published in 1947; among them were the following:

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Air mobility in 1947 began to take new form. The workhorse of World War II had been the DC-3. It either delivered troops by parachute or it landed, requiring about three to four thousand feet of runway. Replacement of this airplane began immediately afterward with the "Flying Boxcar," the C-82. This airplane was designed to meet a requirement of carrying ten tons of cargo one thousand miles and return. The rear of the plane was so designed that the entire cargo could be delivered by parachute in one piece, provided large enough parachutes could be developed and they were. Beyond the Flying Boxcar, other air transports were in prospect, some of considerably greater range and more global than local in their performance.

The performance of the DC-3 was augmented in World War II

_______________________________________________________________________

9. Airborne Warfare, James M. Gavin. Published by the Infantry Journal.

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by towing gliders behind it. These were of tubular construction, covered with fabric or, in the case of the British gliders, with plywood. They proved highly inflammable in heavy flak. I flew as an observer in the airborne operation that crossed the Rhine in March of 1945, and I was appalled by the sight of gliders and planes going down in flames. I remember at one time counting twenty-three, all burning like torches and falling rapidly. After the war, we sought to develop an all-metal glider. Two gliders were produced and their cost convinced us that adding small engines would be a worth-while investment. Thus was born the STOL idea, the "short takeoff and landing" aircraft. It was officially called an assault plane, and it was intended to replace the glider and thus reinforce a parachute assault by airlanding heavy cargo and supplies in the battle area. It appeared, therefore, to have tremendous potential. A third form of air mobility had its genesis in this early postwar period, the VTOL, "vertical takeoff and landing." Thirteen Bell helicopters were assigned to the 82^nd Airborne Division for evaluation and tests in 1946. We did not know what to do with them at first and considered them for possible replacements for the L-4, or artillery spotting [ED: fixed-wing STOL "grasshoppers"] planes used so extensively in World War II. We put quite a bit of time into them and it soon became apparent that we had in our hands an air vehicle of great versatility. Additional types were in prospect, and we urged their procurement as a matter of priority.

Efforts to obtain both new types of air vehicles ran into difficulty at once. In the first place, they were so radically new that there was little interest in them in the newly established Air Force. In the second place, with the establishment of the Air Force, the Army had agreed to procure all of its air vehicles through the new service; thus the Air Force assumed the responsibility of judging the air-worthiness of the Army's expressed requirements. And there was almost as much reluctance to go into these new forms of air mobility in the Army as there was in the Air Force. Most of our senior Army officers had ex-

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perience in combat with other than air mobile units and they looked with considerable skepticism on the enthusiasm of these zealots who were insisting, sometimes with considerable exaggeration, that everything in the Army had to fly. As anyone knew who had fought extensive Panzer formations, much more was needed to win a land battle than parachute and glider troops.

But there was no doubt that our reserves had to be air-transportable. It was a frustrating experience, trying to sell the idea of air mobility and its rapidly expanding field of tactical application.

Both the helicopter and the assault plane seemed to have intriguing possibilities. I talked about them at our service schools and on our boards and urged their procurement in numbers. In 1948 I was appointed president of the Army's Airborne Panel, which was charged with evaluating our present situation and proposing solutions to the problems of the future. But we were soon to learn that all of the studies, panels and boards were of no avail if we could not convince our colleagues in the Air Force of the soundness of our air ideas. A good segment of the Air Force, particularly those who had been with Troop Carriers during the war, thought as we did, but they were rapidly being subordinated to the Big Bomber generals. And while it is easy to accuse the Big Bomber people of poor judgment, it would not be fair to do so, because they too were working within the tight framework of a limited [ED: President Eisenhower butter over guns] budget. Many of them in decision-making positions were intellectually convinced that we could afford but one thing-more and bigger bombers matched to a nuclear retaliatory power. On the other hand, many of them sensed the sterility of such a program, feeling that we needed greater versatility if we were to cope with the Soviets; and they realized that when ultimately the USSR matched our retaliatory power, we would be in a very dangerous position if we had no other capability. We persisted, therefore, in trying to convince the Air Force of the soundness of our thinking, and of course this was necessary since they passed upon the air-worthiness of our air vehicle requirements.

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In the case of the helicopter, I followed the project through the various echelons of the military establishment, finally discussing it personally with the Director of Requirements of the USAF. Our discussions were of a rather protracted nature, extending over the better part of a day on the trip that we took through the West Coast aircraft industries. He finally became exasperated with my insistence and said, "I am the Director of Requirements and I will determine what is needed and what is not. The helicopter is aerodynamically unsound. It is like lifting oneself by one's boot straps. It is no good as an air vehicle and I am not going to procure any. No matter what the Army says, I know that it does not need any." Thus the door was slammed in our faces as we sought to enter an entirely new, and absolutely essential, field of combat air mobility. Thanks to a last-minute crash program, and the programs of the Department of the Navy and the marine corps, we were able to save thousands of lives by helicopter in Korea.

But more than that, the helicopter could have given us a great mobility advantage over the North Koreans and Chinese Communist forces in Korea if we had been allowed to develop its great potential. Now we are "discovering" the tactical wonders of sky cavalry, ten years too late.

The history of the [STOL] assault plane was equally depressing.

T-Tail, rear-ramp equipped C-122 paved the way for today's C-1`30s and C-17s but the USAF only wants to operate the minimum of assault transport to move the Army for 3D maneuver

Michael Stroukoff of the Chase Aircraft Company developed the first useful assault plane, the C-122, which soon grew up to be the C-123. It met all specifications and far outperformed any competitor in the field. Takeoff and landings of eight-ton combat payloads out of pastures and cultivated fields on a few hundred feet were accomplished with little difficulty. Despite repeated requests from the Department of the Army, and ultimately from the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Army himself, assault transport procurement was delayed year after year. Actually, none were ever procured in the original configuration. A much more sophisticated airplane called an assault plane was finally procured as a replacement for the Flying Boxcar long after the

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Korean War. Thus another field of air mobility remained un-exploited as we continued to drift toward a war on the Asiatic mainland, with a primitively equipped Asiatic army.

C. THE ROLE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Fission in 1946 posed the greatest challenge to our military planners that we had ever known. So great was it, in fact, that military thinking seemed, at the outset, to be paralyzed by its magnitude. I know of no one, for the first few years following the war, who questioned that its military use would be exclusively in bombs. The first atomic bomb was of such size that the B-29 that carried it had to be especially modified for the purpose. Such being the case, our earliest nuclear thinking in the Army was in terms of how to defend against use of the bomb on us, and how to team up with nuclear bombers in the offense.

It seemed possible to match nuclear bomber attack with a parachute assault, provided we offered no nuclear targets to the enemy while staging the operation. The first standard operation procedures to accomplish this were tried in the 82^nd Airborne Division in 1947. We simply drew a five-mile circle around our takeoff airfields. Troops were restrained from entering the area of the circle until minutes. before takeoff; thus they were kept dispersed and concentrated only at the moment of loading. Little thought was given to tactical use by the Soviets of nuclear weapons in a surface-to-surface role since they did not have such weapons and it was unlikely that they would for quite a few years.

However, the results of the Bikini tests in 1947 began to suggest new fields of possible tactical application. Certainly the results of those tests made clear that the large amphibious operations such as the Normandy operation would never again be possible against an enemy equipped with nuclear weapons-just as nuclear weapons could have been used effectively against the Normandy defenses. Thus the pattern of future attacks seemed to be emerging as a combined airborne-nuclear assault, using

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tactical weapons. This concept found little receptivity in the Air Force, however, which was discouraging since the Air Force would have to provide both the airlift and the air-delivered weapons. In fact, it would be fair to say that it encountered something close to actual hostility, because it diverted part of the small stockpile of fission material to tactical rather than strategic uses. And at the time-the latter half of the forties-an increasing segment of military and public thinking was becoming committed to nuclear strategic retaliation as an exclusively valid policy.

Survival Under Atomic Attack

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJ1ZlSYtoU

A Day Called "X"

A Day Called 'X' was a dramatized CBS documentary showing a civil defence exercise in Portland, Oregon in which the entire city is evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear air raid, after Soviet bombers had been detected by radar stations to the north. It was filmed in September 1957[1] and aired December 8 of that year.[2][3] It was presented by Glenn Ford.

Its local rebroadcast in 2004[4] and appearance in the on-line Prelinger Archives attracted interest among local history buffs due to its extensive outside shots of the city, and the use of non-actor participants (local officials and broadcasters).[5][6]

On September 27, 1955, Portland actually conducted an exercise evacuation of downtown called "Operation Greenlight,"[7][8] and the film is often misattributed to that year.

Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-cwHA39HIc

Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvVvk2O0JLg

Part 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaLf2gUKYGY

"Urban" bombing was accepted as a sound and proper strategy in most military and civilian circles. This profoundly disturbed me, for obviously the strategy would only remain valid so long as the Soviets were not in a position to deliver nuclear strikes against our own urban areas. When the day did come that actually could, and it was inevitable that it would, then the proper target for our nuclear striking forces would have to be the sources of Soviet nuclear strength, that is, their long-range striking air power. Further, to devote all of our nuclear striking power to urban areas, even though we did so because we considered them to be the indices of industrial production and thus determinants of a war-making capability, would have overlooked the impressive and combat-ready array of Soviet "conventional forces" deployed ready to strike [ED: "asymmetrically" as we would say today]. I often asked the obvious question: What were we to do if cities in Western Europe were overrun? Destroy them, too? And if Western Europe or other areas friendly to us were to be occupied by the Soviets and slowly consumed into the Soviet system in the pattern of Estonia and Latvia, were we to destroy all those areas with nuclear weapons? These were questions that made one very unpopular for the asking, and questions that were never answered.

I became increasingly interested in these problems. It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I received orders to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in March of 1949. The Director of WSEG, Dr. Philip Morse, assigned me the project of

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studying the possible tactical employment of nuclear weapons. I devoted the entire summer of 1949 to reading everything on the subject that I could get my hands on and visiting our laboratories and talking to our scientists. By summer's end, nuclear weapons became more understandable to me and I drafted a paper on the subject. I had become convinced that nuclear weapons had a tremendous field for tactical application, in fact, in the long run, probably the most promising field of all. One of the recommendations in the study was that we should reconsider our then current national policy of allocating all fissionable material to strategic use. This recommendation was very unpopular with my Air Force colleagues and, for the study to be accepted, had to be stricken from it. It made little difference since the study was stamped "Top Secret" and promptly buried in the archives.

Operation Tea Pot Nuclear Weapons Effects

Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSu4q9Ml6pg

Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q10YnfJhTA

Part 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9DWheVb3qs

Fortunately, the publication the following year of the government's unclassified The Effects of Nuclear Weapons released much of the information.

In September of 1949, the White House announced the firing of the first Soviet nuclear device. This development was profoundly disturbing to many of our scientists, who had assumed that we had at least five more years of grace. Now the Soviets were in a position .to undertake a pattern of nuclear diplomacy as they were to do later in missile diplomacy.

I was called into conference in the fall of 1949 to consider the problem of whether or not to develop a thermonuclear weapon.

The problem had been referred to WSEG. Our scientists had been discussing it for some time and their views ranged from, on one hand, "It would be like trying to light wet asbestos in a windstorm and thus it is not worth trying," to "It is feasible and we should go ahead with it as a matter of high priority." Dr. Oppenheimer was present at one of the conferences and he expressed a view in which I found myself in complete agreement.

That is, that more important than trying to devise new ways and means of destroying a bigger portion of the human race, we should try to find ways and means of living with the powers we

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had already created. This was quite fundamental, in that our manpower and nuclear resources were limited and by diverting them to a thermonuclear program, we would, to some extent, be taking away from the other weapons programs. If the urban bombing concept were to remain policy, and thermonuclear weapons were to be added to it, and if that concept were morally and militarily unsound in the beginning, it certainly would be more so with the H-bomb added. I believed that it was unsound and that Dr. Oppenheimer's views were valid. I went to the office of Major General Kenneth Nichols, who had been a deputy to General Groves in the Manhattan Project, and discussed the technical aspects of the program with him. He pointed out that the basic calculations for a thermonuclear weapon had been made sometime ago and that very likely they were now in the hands of the Soviets. Further, that this information was known to Dr. Fuchs and to Pontecorvo, both of whom had gone over to the USSR. He was convinced that the Soviets had a capability of developing a thermonuclear weapon. I had to conclude reluctantly, therefore, that if this were so and if we did not develop one, our position would be very bad indeed. Therefore, I decided that we had to undertake an H-bomb program as a matter of highest priority and I so recommended in WSEG.

In the meantime, however, an increasing number of people were talking about the possible tactical uses of nuclear weapons. An advance study group in the JCS headed by Brigadier General Don Zimmerman, USAF, had done particularly good work in this area. The scientists, too, were beginning to see the possibilities of much smaller sizes and smaller yields. The economics of the use of fissionable materials were being studied also. I recall a figure used by General Zimmerman that when we exceeded twenty-five B-29 bombers delivering high explosives instead of using one carrying an atomic bomb, we were making an uneconomical use of our resources.

Thus we approached the Korean crisis, grossly lacking air mobility and exclusively preoccupied with our newest form of

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firepower, nuclear firepower, packaged for strategic use. However, even though so packaged, it could have been used tactically.

And when the Korean situation broke and the prospects of the defeat of the 8^th Army were real and compelling, General Nichols and I went to the office of General Ridgway and urged that he recommend to the Chief of Staff that he in turn recommend to the President that we use nuclear weapons against the North Korean forces. It would have been militarily inexcusable to allow the 8^th Army to be destroyed without even using the most powerful weapons in our arsenal. Yet, we almost did so! We had already made two combat bombing strikes of about 175 x B-29s without decisive results. The situation in the summer of 1950 offered us a number of well worth-while tactical nuclear targets if we had had the moral courage to make the decision to use them. But this we did not have for reasons that have been the subject of much soul-searching ever since. Dr. Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy treats the subject well. To a large segment of our military planners, Korea just simply should not have taken place. "It has been remarked more than once that had the Korean War not actually taken place, we could never have believed that it could have." And: "The assumption behind our military planning had been that our wars would be fought against a principal enemy and a major challenge, but that our forces-in-being need only be powerful enough to gain us the time to mobilize our industrial potential. This doctrine presupposed two related contingencies: that other powers would bear the initial brunt of aggression and that the threat would be unambiguous," [12]

D. GROWING SOVIET INTRANSIGENCE

In the meantime, while schisms were developing in the Pentagon with the attendant frustrations and delay of programs that should have been advanced, our State Department was dealing with a Soviet government that was becoming increasingly in-

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12. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger.

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transigent. Many of us had felt that we could live with the Soviets without serious conflict in the postwar period; if there were to be differences, we believed that they could be dealt with through the machinery of the United Nations. This would, of course, have depended upon the continued good will of the Soviets. That they were of a different point of view was made apparent as early as 1945, when Pravda published a statement by Stalin, that first had been made to the American Labor Delegation visiting Moscow in September, 1927:

...In the further progress of development of the international revolution, two world centres will be formed: The Socialist centre, attracting to itself all the countries gravitating towards Socialism, and the Capitalist centre, attracting to itself all the countries gravitating towards Capitalism. The fight between these two centres for the conquest of world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and communism throughout the whole world, for the final defeat of world capitalism means the victory of socialism in the arena of world economy. . . .

It was like a pirate running up the skull and crossbones pennant as a declaration of irrevocable intent before closing in the attack. But our leaders continued in their efforts to find a working arrangement with Stalin. From the beginning, they were baffled by the complete and continuing non-co-operation of the Soviet Union; and while the Soviet Union became increasingly difficult to deal with in international discussions, it pursued a course of relentless aggression. To be sure, the United Nations succeeded in forcing its withdrawal from Iran, but this was, now in retrospect, hardly a serious setback. It soon made manifest its intention to gobble entirely the small European nations it had occupied at the end of hostilities. Incidents such as the unwarranted shooting down of an American C-47 airplane by the Yugoslavs, then fully committed to Soviet policies, kept the problem before the public. It was becoming evident that the "hearts and flowers" period of the postwar honeymoon had come to an end.

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For better or for worse, we had to face up to the fact that the teachings of Lenin were Soviet policy once again, and that according to this policy either we or the Soviets would survive, not.

both. "The existence of the Soviet Republic next to a number of imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable." [13] And while they prattled peace, they prepared for war and engaged in war. We called it cold war, but to the Soviets it was war, pure and simple, that they liked to describe, Orwell-like, as peace.

E. THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COLLECTIVE SECURITY PROGRAM

Since collective security was the basis of Free World planning, it soon became apparent to all the Western nations that they would have to look to their own future survival through coalition agreements. The Rio Treaty of 1947 brought together the majority of the nations of the Western Hemisphere. In the spring of 1948, five nations of Western Europe-Britain, France, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands-banded together to form a Western Union, agreeing to come to the aid of each otl1er in the event of an armed attack in Europe. Great Britain, which had been giving.

support to the Greek government, found itself in difficulties and the United States agreed, upon the request of the Greek government, to come to their assistance. Turkey, likewise, was in need of assistance and thus was born the Truman Doctrine. But more was needed than military aid, for many nations of the Free World were still suffering severely from the economic effects of after the war. And since low standards of living and attendant widespread discontent offer fertile fields for Communist exploitation, the United States considered ways and means of coming to the assistance of nations in need of such aid. The Marshall Plan was proposed and the United States firmly embarked upon a policy W" of containing Communism through economic assistance to countries in need. In furtherance of our goal of achieving collective security, President Truman in addressing Congress on March 17, 1948, proposed that the United States should match the deter-

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13. Lenin.

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mination of the free countries of Europe by doing our part to help them. The following summer, Congress adopted a resolution reaffirming our policy as follows:

to achieve international peace and security through the United Nations so that armed force shall not be used except in common interest, and advise(d) the President that it was the intent of the Senate that the United States should associate itself with such regional and other collective arrangements as are based on continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, and as affect its national security.

There followed the North Atlantic Treaty, the first peacetime European military alliance into which the United States has entered.

Thus our international commitments, with attendant military obligations, continued to grow. That they were absolutely necessary there is no doubt-our survival lies in the direction of collective security. By mid-1950 we were committed to defensive arrangements with fourteen NATO partners, and with twenty of our Latin-American neighbors under the provisions of the Rio Treaty. Our military assistance program continued to expand, ultimately involving bilateral defense agreements with forty-six different nations. The Anzus Treaty was signed in 1951 and the SEATO Treaty three years later. Separate mutual defense treaties were signed with the Philippines, Korea and the Republic of China, and a bilateral mutual security treaty with Japan. Thus the policy of achieving security through collective agreements has continued since World War II until the present.

From the viewpoint of the military planner these treaties are what they purport to be-commitments to do something, or to provide something, or both. The wording of the treaty determines the exact nature of the obligational burden that our nation assumes. In general, we agreed in most of the treaties to participate in the common defense in the event of aggression. This implies a capability on our part to do so, and this means military strength in being or in immediate prospect. Thus to a planner it would appear that as our obligations increased, our military

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strength to support those obligations should have increased also.

The contrary was the case.

Our collective security program and our own military readiness programs were quite clearly divergent in the spring of 1950. The Army strength had been reduced from over eight million at the end of World War II to 593,000. The Navy had been reduced from over three million to 381,538, the marine corps from in excess of 474,000 to 74,000 and the Air Force from in excess of two million to slightly over 411,000. The Army stretched its strength on occupation duty from Japan to Berlin. Four divisions at reduced strength were in the Far East, and they had skeletonized and stored their heavy combat equipment. One division plus a constabulary force was in Europe.

We had increased our strength tremendously in one category: our nuclear retaliatory capacity. Unfortunately, this had been accomplished at the expense of our other forces, a trend that had continued to preoccupy our senior Army and Navy leaders since the war. Cautioning against a tendency to overlook our other forms of military power of lesser magnitude, General Bradley testified before a committee of the 80^th Congress in 1948, "Numerous intelligent and thinking people in many quarters have gained the impression that the atom bomb and other weapons of mass destruction have all but eliminated the need for an army in any war which may come." And more alarming than the exclusive reliance that we seemed to be placing in our nuclear bombs, was a by-product of the trend. It was the curtailment of the research and development programs of the so-called "conventional" forces. At a time when we should have been avid in our search for new means and new methods to match the dynamic shifting pattern of war we were, in fact, closing our minds. Never was the saying more true that a nation's greatest danger is in winning a past war, for nothing so stultifies military thinking as victory. We continued to adhere blindly to the age-less pattern of trying to do better the thing that we had done best in the last days of the last war. There is an initiative in mili-

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tary technology, as there is in military operations, and we frequently reassured ourselves that the initiative was ours. Sadly, we soon learned that we had it neither technologically nor operationally. Spring of 1950 came to Washington with the cherry blossoms, the annual visitation of the DAR, and thousands of school children trooping the halls of Congress and ascending the Washington Monument. No ominous signs of trouble ahead disturbed the peaceful scene. The Armed Forces looked their best as they swung down Constitution Avenue. Reporting on the scene in the issue of May 29, 1950, Time stated:

General satisfaction with our state of readiness was the feeling of the moment. A few weeks earlier the Secretary of Defense in defending his fat-cutting budget had made the comment, "Our defenses were in grand shape," and "are adequate to the needs of the hour." Thus in the traditional pattern of the Republic, we drifted to the brink of war, inadequately prepared psychologically and physically. This time the war's first blow was to fall on our own forces.

F. KOREA-AND LIMITED WAR

It fell on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans struck across the 38th Parallel. Acting promptly, and making one of the most courageous and farsighted decisions in our national history, President Trumaan sought and obtained the support of the United Nations. At first it was hoped that our air and naval power would bring the aggression to a halt. Many, in fact, were confident that it would. I was a member of the Weapons Systems Evaluation

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Group at the time, and the senior Air Force member, upon learning that General MacArthur had called for the use of ground troops, remarked: "The old man must be off his rocker. When the Fifth Air Force gets to work on them, there will not be a North Korean left in North Korea." For the Army, trading its lives for time and space, it was a bitter and costly experience. Six reinforced North Korean People's Army divisions came driving across the 38^th Parallel toward Seoul. They were spearheaded by one hundred Russian-built T-34 [medium] tanks and amply supported by Russian-provided planes. In three days, Seoul fell and the North Korean Army's momentum southward continued. General MacArthur scraped together two companies of infantry and a battery of artillery and some supporting weapons, including "six 2.36 bazooka teams (whose weapons, it was discovered, could not stop the T-34 tank)." [14] He had the force flown to Korea; it was all that our limited airlift could transport. Thus the great might of this industrial nation, five years after the defeat of the Axis powers, could do no better than to airlift two rifle companies and a battery of artillery to meet six aggressor divisions.

That it was more than mere implication soon became clear as the strength of the Army was drastically reduced. I was the Assistant to the Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations and later Deputy Chief of Staff of Plans during the cutback. If the initiative had

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been ours, and not that of the Communists, and if there had been no more "Koreas," all would have been well. Unfortunately, the initiative was not ours and the military planners were soon in difficulty again. As one of them, I often thought of the lines from Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body. They were uttered by a disconsolate and angry Confederate as he described the frustrations of fighting the Yankees:

"(He) could whip five yanks with a palm leaf hat, only the yanks won't fight like that". [16]

And so it went with us. We were a powerful nation but the Communists would not co-operate and lead to our strength.

Take Dien Bien Phu for example. To the French it seemed to offer the best tactical solution to the problem of protecting the Hanoi Delta, while at the same time providing a degree of protection to Laos. It was well-organized for all-around defense.

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About a year or so later I mentioned the Vista report to General Norstad and he used strong language in his denunciation of it. Ironically, seven years later as SACEUR he was striving to achieve many of the goals sought in the report.

Unfortunately, Dr. Oppenheimer was in trouble, and his participation in Vista added to the aura of suspicion with which the Big Bomber advocates were now surrounding him. As The Reporter expressed it in an editorial some years later, in 1957:

9-ton M50 Ontos light tankette could be flown easily by piston-engined USAF transports to deliver an Army "Sky Cavalry"

The Vista recommendations had sought to improve the capabilities of each of the services. The Army was urged to adopt a lightweight tank killer, the Ontos. It has since been developed by the marine corps. Vista recommended an across-the-board improvement in communications, the development of tactical nuclear missiles to replace the 280mm, and an extensive improvement in intelligence-handling systems. It finally recommended the establishment of a Combat Developments Center to test new tactical concepts with troops. This has been established.

For the Navy, among other things, it urged a step-up in out antisubmarine defenses and the development of across-the-beach cargo and personnel-handling facilities.

The Air Force recommendations were almost entirely related to improving its capability to wage tactical, nuclear or non-nuclear war. Among other things it recommended procuring 400 x C-124 and 850 x C-123 Troop Carrier aircraft by 1954, tactical nuclear

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17. "The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb," Fortune, May, 1953, p. 109.

18. The Reporter, December 26, 1957.

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DISCUSSION: the Ontos light tankette was air-mobile in both the C-123 (1) and the C-124 (2) to be the vertical airdrop landing (VADL) parachute airdrop and STOL "cow pasture" airland Sky Cavalry with hard-hitting recoilless weapons Gavin described in his 1954 Harper's magazine article "Cavalry and I don't Mean Horses", and the Ontos could be helicopter and fixed-wing VTOL mobile when aircraft capable of lifting its 9 tons became available.

"Where was the cavalry? ...and I don't mean horses. I mean helicopters and light aircraft, to lift Soldiers armed with automatic weapons and hand-carried light anti-tank weapons, and also lightweight reconnaissance vehicles, mounting anti-tank weapons the equal or better than the Russian T-34s...If ever in the history of our armed forces there was a need for the cavalry arm--airlifted in light planes, helicopters and assault-type aircraft--this was it... Only by exploiting to the utmost the great potential of flight can we combine complete dispersion in the defense with the facility of rapidly massing for the counter-attack which today's and tomorrow's Army must possess"

www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m65.htm

There are arguments over the value of the atomic cannon, especially in regard to range, but General Collins believed the threat of its deployment had a role in bringing about the Korean armistice and did not doubt the presence in Europe "of our nuclear guns has contributed greatly as a deterrent to any offensive by the Soviets."

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We discussed the characteristics of the tactical weapons that would soon become available, particularly the 280mm [ED: Atomic Annie cannon], and the advantages that would accrue in the use of fissionable material when we were able to replace the artillery weapons with missiles or small air-dropped weapons. There was no question in my mind at the time about the essentiality of tactical nuclear weapons to NATO's future. The problem, and it was an urgent one, was to develop the tactics and organizational structure that would enable the NATO forces to fight successfully in tactical nuclear warfare.

From Paris I then went to Naples, Italy, for duty with Admiral Carney's Southern European command. The Admiral was one of the finest men to work for that I had the privilege of associating with in Europe and the tactical problems of the area were challenging, to say the least. I had numerous opportunities to visit our faraway fronts in Turkey, Greece and northern Italy. The northern Italy area particularly adapted itself to the tactical employment of nuclear weapons since the mountains channelized an

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attacker. The greatest danger was in a large-scale vertical envelopment. This, however, could be dealt with by a defense-in-depth, specifically by organizing the Apennines as well as the Alps. Admiral Carney had recommended, on a number of occasions, the static use of nuclear weapons in the Alpine passes and they obviously had great merit. The Greek and Turkish areas, with the exception of the area immediately north of the Dardanelles, which is rolling open country, likewise offered excellent opportunities for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in defense.

The Dardanelles defense required mobile armored forces in considerable numbers, matched with nuclear weapons, in order to handle the type of attack that might be expected through that area. It was evident, in the summer of 1952, that nuclear weapons would play a decisive role in the defense of the Southern European area.

In December of 1952, I received orders to take command of the United States VII Corps, then occupying all of southern Germany from the Alps north to an east-and-west line just above Nuremberg. It contained the cities of Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Munich and Heilbron. The most prominent terrain features were the open rolling farmlands of the east backed by the Swabian Alps in the west. The Danube bisected the area, running generally west to east and the Rhine River ran north and south directly across the rear of the area. The corps had been on occupation duty since the widespread tension following the opening of the Korean War.

It consisted of two mechanized cavalry regiments deployed on the border, two infantry divisions behind them, and numerous supporting artillery, engineer, signal and transportation units. It offered me the opportunity that I had been seeking to develop tactical nuclear concepts for our infantry organizations. I started to work on the project at once.

The Staff developed a plan for the defense of the area along World War II lines. This was done as a map exercise, initially, and we then conducted an actual count of the troops and their supplies dispersed throughout the area in terms of quantity per

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five-kilometer square. A five-kilometer square was selected because it was one that would contain a circle 2 kilometers in radius, which was the median lethal distance of a fifty-kiloton weapon. [19] When the raw data were assembled and compiled, a plot was made, showing by color gradient the density of our forces in defense. It was evident, at once, in relating this density to nuclear weapons that the Soviets could use in attack, that it would fragment badly and lead to quick defeat in tactical nuclear combat. We then turned to the problem of rearranging our deployments so as to offer the best prospect of defense against nuclear weapons, consistent with the accomplishment of our mission.

Using the existing forces, we soon learned that the World War II type organizations, no matter how packaged, would not adapt themselves to nuclear tactics. The one exception was our armored divisions. Our rearranging involved a complete re-examination of the terrain and its defense characteristics, the availability of airstrips and suitable air-landing areas, and the location of extensive underground shelters, of which there are quite a few in southern Germany. At the conclusion of our studies, forces were again deployed and their density analyzed. We learned that it was entirely practicable to provide optimum defense with a quick tactical responsiveness to an attack in a two-sided nuclear war provided certain steps in reorganization were accomplished.

One would assume that an alliance so conceived and so dedicated would move forward, with a minimum of internal friction, to high levels of achievement. Such, unfortunately, has not been the case. Neither dedication nor hard work on the part of its planners have brought NATO to the goals so eagerly sought.

None of the force levels of NATO which have been announced periodically with such fanfare has ever been achieved. Almost a decade after its creation, NATO is still without a force sufficient to prevent its members from being overrun by the Soviet army. [21] I have worked closely with NATO and within NATO, almost since its inception. I have no reservations whatsoever about the soundness of the concept and the compelling need for it to be successful. And NATO can be successful, and can achieve its lofty goals and serve Western man as no other political and military creation in Western history. But this will take realism, sacrifice and courage. Mere agreements on paper and periodic high-level meetings with much attendant publicity will not give NATO an added bit of strength.

NATO strength must come, first of all, from confidence. This is absolutely fundamental. It must have confidence in the goals it seeks and it must have confidence in the technical adequacy of the means available to achieve those goals.

Confidence within NATO will best be served when we are realistic with each other. The NATO nations collectively comprise the most highly educated, sophisticated and industrialized

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20. The Great Deterrent, Sir John Slessor.

21. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Henry A. Kissinger.

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area in the world. Its political and military leaders are outstanding. I have known many of the senior military leaders for some years, and I have discussed NATO military problems with them on many occasions. As a group of professionals, they are, unmatched anywhere in the world today. I have no concern whatsoever for their performance in peace or war, nuclear or non-nuclear.

However, above all, they are realistic. For their peoples have fought to defend their homeland against aggression since the beginning of recorded time. More than any nations in the world, they recognize the importance of collective security. To achieve such security in a collective manner-and this includes the participation of the United States in every sense of the word-they will reach compromises between what they know must be done and what they consider the other NATO nations are willing to do.

Polite murmurs of agreement will go round the council tables and periodic communiques' will go out over the press wires, from time to time assuring an uneasy world of the potential strength of NATO and the soundness of its military planning. Privately, however, most of the senior military people are worried, for they know, as we know, that the Soviet nuclear colossus once in motion will be difficult to stop, and that if the most modem weapons are not in the hands of the NATO nations, they will be overrun in a nuclear catastrophe without precedence in human history. As the NATO military forces fall back or disintegrate, the next tactical decision confronting NATO's military leaders will be how to liberate the overrun territory. One gunpowder liberation in a generation is enough. Few of them will admit welcoming a nuclear liberation. And yet, this is what is implied in a military policy that would rely upon a "trip wire" strategy and nuclear retaliation by forces not even under the control of NATO.

NATO members must have confidence in each other and this implies mutual trust and a free exchange of information. A free exchange of technical military information provides the basis of understanding the latest trends in military technology. And in the dynamic technological age in which we live, this is of the utmost

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importance. A technological lag of even a few years could spell military disaster.

The members of NATO must have confidence in the military policies that serve it. This, of course, is related to NATO's awareness of the manner in which technology can serve it. Our military policies, therefore, must be those that would serve NATO and its members and not destroy them. Finally, not a small part of NATO's confidence must stem from a conviction of the thriving and promising nature of the cause they serve, and the righteousness of that cause. The member nations of NATO must have an ideal to which they may aspire that is more than the mere maintenance of the status quo. NATO must be a proponent of something, something worthy of the aspirations of the free people of all of Europe, and of the world for that matter. And it should provide a cause to which they can feel, at least in their hearts, they can rally. It therefore needs a doctrine and a military program ,to serve that doctrine. It needs it collectively exactly as each nation needs it separately. NATO's problem is our problem as Americans.

The free exchange of information within NATO has been one of our most difficult problems. The NATO nations have been considerate and understanding, knowing that the laws passed by the properly elected legislative bodies of the member countries sometimes preclude the free exchange of information. In some cases, an exchange may be permitted with one or two nations, but not with all. This is more damaging, in many respects, than no exchange at all since it tends to create cliques of nations within NATO itself and nothing short of Soviet penetration could be b more harmful. Yet we have such a situation today. Aside from the intangible but insidious harm caused by holding back information, real physical harm is done.

We are in a technological revolution of the most profound nature. Nuclear weapons are one sign of that revolution. Nuclear weapons are here to stay and the basic problem is to learn to live with them. Nuclear weapons can now be made so small in size

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and light in weight as to be man-handleable and shoulder-fired.

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M113 Gavin with Davey Crockett small nuclear rocket launcher to incinerate attacking enemy masses

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They can be employed in infantry combat, in the smallest of units. Fissionable material is becoming available in such abundance that the economics of the situation alone will soon compel its use as replacement for the tons of high explosives and steel shells used in the gunpowder era. That this information is not exclusively ours was made abundantly clear in the parade of November 7, 1957, in Moscow celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Red Revolution. There the Soviets chose to display a family of highly mobile nuclear missiles. It is important to realize that these were the ones we were allowed to see, and even so, they included short-range infantry-support nuclear missiles on amphibious track-laying vehicles, missiles with a combat mobility unsurpassed in any Western army today. Their display included both liquid- and solid-propellant missiles, and both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles. It is of the utmost importance to NATO, therefore, that nuclear information be provided to all of its members. Out of ignorance, too many still think of nuclear firepower as their ancestors of five hundred years ago thought of gunpowder: "0h curs'd device! base implement of death! Fram'd in the black Tartarean realms beneath By Beelzebub's malicious art design'd to ruin all the race of human kind." [22] The problem in NATO is not how to avoid use of nuclear weapons, for that is a decision the Soviets will make, but how to live with them when they are used. How to make nuclear weapons the servant of NATO and how to avoid making NATO the slave of nuclear weapons-that is the problem.

Nuclear weapons are essential to an adequate defense of Western Europe. Take, for example, air defense. Time and space are such in Europe today that only missiles can provide an adequate air defense. The British White Paper of 1957 recognized this. The most exposed nation is Western Germany. It can only be defended against Soviet air and missile attack by having nuclear surface-to-air missiles. There are technological reasons for

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22. Ariosto (1474-1533).

this. The reaction time is such that manned aircraft can no longer respond quickly enough to meet an enemy threat. Neither men nor airplanes are adequate to deal with attacking missiles and rockets. Finally, the objective of a modern air defense must be to destroy the payload of the incoming missile or bomb-carrying plane. Technologically, this is possible using a nuclear missile in defense. Obviously, therefore, if Western Germany is to be defended and not abandoned immediately, she must have nuclear surface-to-air missiles. It is idle chatter and simply a waste of time to talk otherwise.

In defending against Soviet land forces matched with nuclear missiles, the NATO nations must themselves be equipped with a family of surface-to-surface nuclear missiles. For missiles are modern artillery and tactical nuclear warheads are modern conventional firepower. It would be as wrong to ask the NATO nations to defend against Soviet nuclear aggression with gunpowder weapons as it would have been to equip our own forces with bows and arrows to deal with the blitzkrieg.

All nuclear missiles should be highly mobile. The Germans learned this lesson in World War II, when their concrete bases were completely destroyed, while their mobile missile units were not harmed until overrun by our ground forces. Because of the a fact that our Air Force has had primary responsibility for the deployment of our Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles overseas, it has thought of their employment in terms of air bases and aircraft employment.

Army Jupiter IRBMs could be air-transported by USAF C-124 Globemaster IIs

VIDEO: 1:20 shows Jupiter-C flown in a C-124 Globemaster II

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CTTF8-wmcQ

I was responsible for developing the tactical characteristics of the Army's Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, the Jupiter. It was designed to be as mobile as any piece of equipment in the present-day field army. It was designed for movement on highways to launching areas through all kinds of weather. Neither rain nor snow nor fog nor extremes of temperature can impair its launching. Furthermore, its over-all configuration is such that it can be stored in highway and rail tunnels. Mobility is so fundamental to success in combat that it is inconceivable that anyone would consider Maginot-Line-like bases as militarily

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... a new policy which, in the name of regaining "the initiative," can tend only to retie our hands to the old pre-1950 limits, shackle us once more to a single, "retaliatory" strategy and invite the Soviets to hit us again, if they wish to, in ways to which this strategy demonstrably offers no useful reply. . . . The return to the retaliatory and strategic atom is not consonant with the argument that. . . "we need allies and collective security"; for probably the best way to lose allies is to make it clear that you no longer intend to provide them with the means of local defense. It is not consonant with the EDC policy and the statement that "rearmed Germans" must "serve the common cause"; for "rearmed Germans" must mean infantry (not atomic bomber crews) and if we no longer need American infantry for local defense how can we claim that we need German infantry? [23]

Unfortunately, the New Look soon found expression in NATO policy and a document known as MC-48 was published. It envisioned a war in which the first phase would be a brief massive nuclear exchange, the outcome of which would very likely determine the outcome of the war. Some of our most able Soldiers subscribed to it, notably ['www.geocities.com/militaryincompetence] Field Marshal Montgomery, and his statements in support of it were widely used. In fact, they were reproduced by the Air Force Association and distributed to retired as well as active Air Force officers.

In the Department of the Army Staff, we were profoundly concerned with implications of the New Look, but we felt that subsequent events would soon make clear its unsoundness. Our concern was for the by-products of the New Look that would not be apparent for some time, but that would in the long run be very damaging to national security. Specifically, failure to support our surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missile programs, inadequate funds to support a satellite program, which we were proposing in 1954, inadequate funds for our research and development programs so essential to the development of land forces for the nuclear missile age, and finally a serious reduction in manpower at a time when the trend should have been exactly the opposite, all worried us. That our concerns were well founded soon became manifest.

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28. "Arms and Men," New York Herald Tribune, February, 1954.

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When I joined the Army Staff in early 1954, the Army contained twenty divisions and seven basic training organizations with divisional numbers. In accordance with the philosophy of the New Look, a critical cut in this division strength was undertaken at once. First, the Army was directed to include the training organizations in its over-all division strength. The total number of divisions was then reduced to match the old number of combat-ready divisions, so that if you didn't examine the numbers closely you would be given the impression that no reduction had taken place. As the cut back continued, and some concern was expressed on the part of Congress, the Army was directed to regroup its non-division personnel and thus account for more divisions. For example, forces at Fort Benning, Georgia, were grouped on paper with those in the Panama Canal Zone and called a "division".

Likewise, forces at Fort Lewis, Washington, were grouped with those in Alaska. To some segments of the press, these became known as "Wilson divisions". Concurrently, Congress was assured, in the annual hearings, that our combat strength was not being reduced, that as our atomic stockpile increased, fewer divisions would be required, and that we were cutting the fat and non-essential service and support units. That the contrary was the case few, outside of the Department of the Army, seemed willing to admit.

More important than manpower cuts, however, was the inability to obtain adequate funds for the missile programs. In late 1954 it was decided that it was in the nation's interest that we develop, as a matter of high priority, an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, and that we undertake a satellite program. After considerable staff discussion, I personally recommended to General Ridgway in March of 1955 that the IRBM program be undertaken at a cost of $25 million. At the end of a week's time, I discussed it with him again, and he stated that he could not possibly obtain money on that scale from the Department of Defense, and that if the Army were to undertake the program, it would have to be out of the money then available to it. Since the

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Army's budget was critically inadequate, the decision was made not to start an IRBM but to advance the Redstone from its proposed range of two hundred miles to five hundred miles. It was hoped that by the time a range of five hundred miles was achieved, the Department of Defense would be aware of the national need and authorize a longer range. We were at the time in a most interesting situation in missile development. In 1951, the Army had undertaken the development of a 450-mile-range ballistic missile. Then at the direction of our missile "czar," Mr. K. T. Keller, a heavy thermonuclear warhead was programmed for the missile and its range, of necessity, was reduced to two hundred miles. This was a good change since it assured the country of an early surface-to-surface thermonuclear missile. At the time, however, there was no interest in the Army's missile program because evidently it was considered rather "exotic" and "far in the future". Therefore, in early 1955, when the Army decided once again to develop a missile of five-hundred-mile range, there was little interest shown in it outside of the Army.

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In the different kinds of limited war that might confront us, certain types of nuclear weapons have a genuine military usefulness. It would therefore be wrong on our part to deprive ourselves of these weapons.

However, our stockpile should include only weapons that are actually useful in war. Moreover, it should include only weapons that we can legitimately intend to use. I am altogether opposed to any school of thought that would move on toward weapons of ever-increasing magnitude, while at the same time disclaiming the intention of using them.

Commissioner Murray went on to recommend the procurement of tens of thousands of very small nuclear weapons, stating that, "A stockpile of this composition will support a theory of moderate and discriminating use of force against all aggression, including aggression that may be minor in degree." There is no doubt whatsoever of the need for small nuclear warheads in abundance. We know that at least four powers have nuclear weapons: the United States, the USSR, Great Britain and France. We can expect other powers to have them in time. The state of nuclear technology is such that the tactical characteristics of weapons can be improved with further testing. This means not only can they be made smaller in size and more efficient in yield, but that they can also be made cleaner and thus better suited to tactical use. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough has been done, for again we conflict with the requirement for large-yield weapons for so called "strategic" employment.

It would be particularly unfortunate if we fell behind in the development and procurement of tactical weapons. Heretofore, the United States has relied in war upon its great industrial capacity. Industry responded quickly and shifted its skills to the making of tanks, trucks and airplane parts, diverting the raw materials intended for consumer use to military production.

Nuclear weapons are another matter. Fissionable material is not being applied to consumer products and there will be a specific amount of fissionable material available at the outset of hostilities.

We will be caught in a very precarious situation, for if nuclear hostilities commence, even in limited areas, and we find ourselves

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opposed by modernized land forces well equipped with nuclear weapons such as the type shown us on November 7 by the Soviets, we may well find ourselves in serious trouble at once. In order to meet our world-wide requirements, we may have to ration drastically our tactical nuclear ammunition and as a consequence we may suffer the loss of another war, this one a nuclear limited war.

So the pattern of Korea may be extended into the nuclear era if we do not have the foresight to see the need and the courage to make the decisions to procure the necessary tactical nuclear weapons now. We should either procure and stockpile many more small weapons, or we must procure and stockpile fissionable material. It is now clear that national policy on this subject has changed since January of 1954. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in the issue of October, 1957, Mr. John Foster Dulles said:

Later, upon returning from a North Atlantic Council session in Paris in an interview with the press, Mr. Dulles is reported to have said: "Tactical weapons such as atomic cannon are fast becoming conventional and presumably they would be used in war."

Unfortunately, there is a vast chasm between statements of policy and military capabilities. There is much to be done if this is to be bridged, for the acceptance of tactical nuclear weapons

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suggests an entirely different pattern of war. Missiles in many categories, extensive tactical land and air mobility, vastly improved intelligence-gathering systems and improved communications are all required. The programs of the Department of Defense today indicate little awareness of this need. The Army, which has had a great potential for missiles development and a great need for the associated components of its weapons systems for that kind of a war, has been limited by a steadily deteriorating budget, and this has been the technical dilemma. While policy appears to have changed, the military programs supporting that policy have not changed and the dilemma, that was a military-political one at the time of Korea, slowly has become technical how to provide the missiles, mobility and associated equipment required for tactical nuclear warfare under the fiscal limitations and the artificial restrictions imposed by the Department of Defense.

Seemingly, more preoccupied with rhetoric than reason, and with publishing restrictive memoranda than with urging that more rather than less be done to solve the problems of limited war, the Department of Defense continued on its course out of harmony with the Executive.

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So contrary to the national need has this course been that there is real need to ask ourselves whether or not we have been the victims of Soviet strategy? To the Soviets we are at war, and the conduct of war involves to an increasing degree its fourth dimension: strategy. Strategy includes technology, and thus the making of technological decisions. For example, we are constantly faced with the problem of how much of the national product to put into our military programs. The state of Soviet economy, its very low standard of living and its ability to get more out of its people for less investment in consumer goods, has enabled the Soviets to maintain a huge military establishment. And not only to maintain it, but to refurbish it from time to time. Compared to the Soviets, we seem constantly worried lest too much of our national product go into our military program. In fact, it was this very point that caused us finally to rely exclusively on a one weapons system for some years. If our economy is as precarious as this suggests, then it would be an extremely worth-while strategy for the Soviets to cause us to invest in weapons systems that would not serve our need but would in fact, in the strategic sense, serve theirs. As an example, there are many well-informed individuals in intelligence circles who doubt that the Soviets have huge fleets of manned bomber aircraft. Instead they believe that the Soviets achieved a significant lead over us by jumping ahead to missiles quite a few years ago, while at the same time they led us to believe that the bomber threat was the most serious.

Within the pattern of strategy of the war in which the Soviet Union is now engaged with the West, we should expect them to devote a major propaganda effort to causing us to create weapons systems that will serve the Soviets rather than serve us. And I use the expression "serve the Soviets" in a strategic sense. Thus if the Soviets' strategy is sound, the tactical application of their power will meet with success because we have been misled strategically and are incapable of meeting the technical challenge.

Hence, it seems reasonable to presume that as long as the Soviets

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have the strategic initiative, and our actions, as a consequence, are reactive, we should expect the Soviets to talk constantly about the danger of global war. We should expect them to deprecate any thought of local war, and we should expect their military and political leaders to boast of their most powerful long-range equipment. If they could cause us to invest a sizable portion of our national product at the proper time in weapons systems that in fact could not serve, while for what we consider economic reasons we neglect others, they will have achieved a major strategic victory.

The time-honored principle of civilian control of defense matters is sound and absolutely fundamental in our democracy. It must be preserved and the efforts of our military should serve its continuance. It worked particularly well through World War II. At that time the Secretaries of the separate services had competent military staffs to advise them. The civilian Secretaries made the decisions, defended their programs before Congress, and assumed full responsibility for the exercise of civilian control over their departments. That it was exercised effectively the record now shows. With the establishment of the Department of Defense in 1947, an additional layer of civilian management was placed above the services. Furthermore, by the law, military officers are forbidden to be staff officers in the Department of Defense. By its ruling they may be aides and assistants. They do not occupy executive or decision-making positions. In order to conduct the affairs of his office, therefore, the Secretary of Defense had to bring in increasing numbers of civilian secretaries. These have varied in competence from one who was recently reported in the press to have spent a few days a month in his office, to some of the most able men in public life. There has been much criticism of the large numbers of Assistant Secretaries and the

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manner in which they have retarded decision-making in the Department of Defense. Some of it, but far from all of it, is justified.

However, there is one layer of civilian participation that is almost entirely overlooked and it is one of the most significant in the Department. It is the group of Civil Service career people who, year in, year out, work in the Pentagon. Within the Armed Forces themselves there are many able Civil Service people who contribute effectively. However, within the services the decisions and final recommendations are made by uniformed people to their civilian Secretaries. In the Department of Defense, lacking senior military staff officers, the Assistant Secretaries rely largely on the Civil Service employees. In the Department of Defense, there are over three hundred such individuals. They probably have more impact on decision-making in the Department of Defense than any other individual or group of individuals, military or civilian. Here is an illustration of the decision-making problem, as the Department of Defense is now organized, and presumably will be organized after congressional action of the 85^th Congress.

Since he is required to obey such instructions, he then, upon being queried by a member of Congress about the adequacy of the program, faced with the dilemma of telling a falsehood or being insubordinate. The degree of this difficulty reflects, to a large extent, the adequacy of the defense budget. When there is an abundance of money and most programs are well supported, there appears to be no great problem. However, when less money becomes available, as has been the situation in the Army for the past several years, then painful decisions must be made to delay or eliminate programs entirely. Sometimes it quickly becomes apparent that some of these programs are critical to our very survival. An individual who is aware of our military history and who is sensitive to our national need is soon- faced with a very difficult choice. Should he, motivated by a growing concern for our national survival, tell Congress the truth and thus invite the wrath of the Executive hierarchy upon himself? Or should he be

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24. Department of the Army Memorandum to prospective witnesses before Congressional Appropriation Committees.

Book

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WALL STREET AND THE RISE OF HITLER: Stan Monteith interviews Anthony Sutton

Since the early 1920s unsubstantiated reports have circulated to the effect that not only ... all German industrialists, but also Wall Street financiers, had some role - possibly a substantial role - in the rise of Hitler and Naziism. This book presents previously unpublished evidence, a great deal from files of the Nuremburg Military Tribunals, to support this hypothesis. However, the full impact and suggestiveness of the evidence cannot be found from reading this volume alone. Two previous books in this series, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and FDR, described the roles of the same firms, and often the same individuals and their fellow directors, hard at work manipulating and assisting the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, backing Franklin D. Roosevelt for President in the United States in 1933, as well as aiding the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany. in brief, this book is part of a more extensive study of the rise of modern socialism and the corporate socialists.

This politically active Wall Street group is more or less the same elitist circle known generally among Conservatives as the "Liberal Establishment," by liberals (for instance G. William Domhoff) as "the ruling class," and by conspiratorial theorists Gary Allen and Dan Smoot as the "Insiders." But whatever we call this self-perpetuating elitist group, it is apparently fundamentally significant in the determination of world affairs, at a level far behind and above that of the elected politicians.

The influence and work of this same group in the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany is the topic of this book. This is an area of historical research almost totally unexplored by the academic world. It is an historical minefield for the unwary and the careless not aware of the intricacies of research procedures. The Soviets have long accused Wall Street bankers of backing international fascism, but their own record of historical accuracy hardly lends their accusations much credence in the West, and they do not of course criticize support of their own brand of fascism.

He goes on to praise the characteristics of the Army, pointing out that it had been "reared in the spirit of Soviet patriotism and and proletarian internationalism." It is well that he praised the party, for a failure to do so presages quick oblivion. Referring to his predecessor, Zhukov, he said: "...the party so justly condemned the mistakes and checked the harmful practices of the former Minister of Defense, Zhukov, who pursued a policy of abolishing the leadership and control of the Army and the Navy by the party, its Central Committee, and the government." He attributed more to the party, however, than credit for past achievements. He pointed out the role that the party now plays, and it is most important that we realize the significance of this role, for in the final analysis the Soviet military establishment is an instrument of the Communist party. Its performance is not predictable in terms meaningful to Western military thinking, no more than the political performance of the Communists should appear rational to the Western politician. No matter what the Red Army or Air Force or Navy leaders say they might do in any

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In Airborne Warfare, I concluded that "the knowledge of the existence of a well-trained airborne army, capable of moving anywhere on the globe on short notice, available to the international security of a body such as the United Nations, is our best guarantee of lasting peace." Referring specifically to this, General Brushko says:

I was rather shocked when I first was given the party line on who won the war. It was in Berlin in the summer of '45. The question arose as to who was to lead the Victory Parade then being planned. To my disbelief, the Soviet member of the Kommandatura told me in so many words that they had won the war. Thinking back over the trail of white crosses extending from Morocco through Sicily, Italy, Normandy, Belgium and Holland, right up to east bank of the Elbe, and of the 65,000 troops who processed through the 82^nd Airborne Division in its almost three years of fighting, I could not believe my ears. I told him what I thought about it. He seemed a bit embarrassed and then rather grudgingly admitted that the British, French and the Americans all had something to do with winning the war, he supposed. But, I felt at the moment, my obvious unwillingness to say "yes" to the party line shocked him more than his statement did me. The point of view of the party was to him religion and under no circumstances to be questioned. It was but one of a number of fundamental differences that became apparent as our work in the Kommandatura went along. But it did seem, at times, that it must have been refreshing to the Soviets to hear the free discussion and exchange of ideas that took place between the three non-Soviet members.

In addition to the contributions that the party makes to the

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internal military structure of the Soviet Union, it also controls the international military program. The extent and nature of arms and technical advisory assistance to China, Korea, Syria and Egypt all reflect the policies and pattern of international Communism, in its march to world domination. Such military support is far greater than most people realize. In addition to supporting the satellites with an abundance of modern equipment, the Soviets have been able to export vast quantities of tanks, self-propelled guns, airplanes and even submarines. The London Times of August 27, 1957, reporting on but a small part of the military equipment going to Syria, lists the following equipment:

200 T -34 tanks

50 heavy self-propelled guns

200 armored troop carriers

140 large field guns

100 smaller guns

60 antiaircraft guns

70 MIG fighters

The total aid up to that time was estimated to be in the vicinity of $150 million dollars. This military aid was accompanied by additional support such as airfield construction, technical assistance, etc. It is sizable military inventory for a [small] country like Syria.

Finally, more important than the overt well-published aid, are the covert shipments, such as those intercepted by the French en route to the Algerian Nationalists. Through the mechanism of the party and its extensive international network, it has been possible for the Soviets to carry on their successful program of international support, while at the same time they have convinced the recipients of the support, and many millions of the uncommitted people of the world, of their "peaceful" intentions. Being a function of the party, and thus highly centralized in its control and direction, it is subject to quick change in direction and quick responsiveness to the needs of governmental policy.

Obviously, there are disadvantages as well as advantages to their system. When the military doctrine of a nation ceases to be

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One defeat after another was their lot until the turning point at Moscow and Stalingrad. As an indication of the magnitude of the disaster at Kiev, which lasted for ten days beginning on August 25, 1941, the Germans captured 665,000 prisoners, 884 tanks, 3,718 field guns and 3,500 motor vehicles. By that date, the Germans had captured nearly a million and one-half Russians and over seven thousand tanks. And while the Soviet Army was being decisively defeated in battle, Soviet industries were moving to the east preparing for the long-drawn-out war that they fully expected to win. And then, in the pattern of the history of war within Russia, the severe Russian winter of 1941-42 began to be felt. German casualties began to mount and the high tide of the war had been reached. By its end, the Soviets had developed a family of armored vehicles as good as or better than anything that the Germans could produce-and the Germans had splendid combat armor. The J-3 Stalin tank and the T-34 both technically surprised the Germans. The Germans, in accordance with the intuitive strategy of Hitler, who did not want to surrender an inch of territory once captured, attempted positional warfare.

The Soviets developed a form of deep fast-moving armored envelopments. They out-blitzkrieged the blitzkrieg. The Soviet forces that we met in the summer of '45 were lean, tough, well equipped and thoroughly professional, and while we may have been critical of their poor medical service or their lack of administration or their ill-kempt appearance, they had fought a first-class foe and fought very well.

Since World War II, the Soviet military establishment has shown a definite infatuation with its victories in that war. The techniques in its service schools continue today to emphasize the - deep fast-moving armored penetrations, double and single envelopments, that characterized their successful offensive of 1945.

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2. Halder Diaries, entry of June 22, 1941.

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In a recent critique, Marshal Zhukov criticized the Russian troop leaders for not moving more aggressively and for not showing more initiative, saying that the Russian armor could be on the English Channel in forty-eight hours in case of war. While their pattern of military thinking seems akin to that of World War II, they have completely re-equipped and have begun to show an interest in nuclear tactical warfare.

The problem of nuclear warfare appears to have been as perplexing to them as it has been to the West. For a number of years, senior Soviet officers claimed that there was no such thing as tactical nuclear weapons, claiming such a limitation in their use was not possible. The Soviet ground forces journal, Military Herald, in March, 1955, said:

Similar views were expressed by other Soviet spokesmen at that time. Major General Talensky, writing in 1955, in describing modem war, said:

It is interesting, in passing, to note that essentially the same points were being raised by some of our Western military people

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who were not technically well informed on nuclear matters. As in the case of the West, a general change in Soviet attitude slowly began to become apparent. Marshal Zhukov in 1957 said that "tactical atomic weapons, if they are not bared, will in the next few years be introduced into the organic armament of the troops in place of conventional weapons." In the meantime, while the senior Soviet officers were slowly coming around in their thinking to the inevitability of nuclear weapons being employed tactically, the training of the Soviet Army in such matters was undertaken. In 1954 and 1955, a series of articles appeared in The Red Star, a Soviet service paper, describing the characteristics of nuclear explosions and the measures to be taken in self-defense. At about the same time, regular radio broadcasts were made on the same subject over the equivalent of our own Armed Forces Network. These were translated by the Rand Corporation and I found them quite interesting. They contained a great deal more technical discussion than we would consider appropriate for dissemination to all of the troops. And much of the information appeared to have come from our own published data. A series of manuals were developed describing appropriate behavior in a nuclear environment. These encompassed everything from individual behavior to the tactical handling of the field army in tactical nuclear warfare. In 1956, Marshal Zhukov informed the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, "In recent years considerable work on the training of troops in the art of conducting combat operations under conditions of the use of atomic weapons and other new weapons in the ground forces, aviation and the navy has been conducted." It is interesting to note that the Soviets have come to the conclusion that the key to the solution of the tactical problem in atomic warfare is mobility. "Under conditions of employment of atomic weapons, troops will in general operate dispersed in order to save men and material, collecting into a striking concentration only at the time of the attack." And finally, a spokes-

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man for the general staff, a Lieutenant General Krasilnikov, stated that nuclear warfare "calls not for the combatants, but for the logical further increase." While Soviet doctrinal development and training in nuclear warfare has been carried on, a research and development program to put this doctrine into action has been aggressively pursued. That it has been done with imagination and energy, and considerable investment of resources, is now quite evident. The family of tactical nuclear missiles displayed on November 7, 1957, cannot be matched anywhere in the Western world at this time. One may take a single warhead or a single missile without a launcher, or even a specific motor vehicle and claim superiority for the West. But this would be a labored effort, and as anyone who has carefully studied the Soviet programs during the past ten years must admit, their readiness to engage in tactical nuclear warfare, or in limited non-nuclear war, far exceeds that of the West at this time.

Unlike the West, which currently appears preoccupied with the problem of limited war, the Soviets seem to take all war for granted. To them war is war and it may take any form and any degree of violence, depending upon the situation. To categorize it as limited or unlimited seems not to be officially recognized, even though it is in keeping with the teachings of Communism. Actually, if one is to believe the official "party line" of the Communist party, if there were a war, it would be an all-out war in every respect. This is echoed in the public statements of the senior officials. Nikita Khrushchev, in an interview with Bob Considine, reported by INS in November of 1957, stated:

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On another occasion, Marshal Zhukov stated that if war does come, it will involve the use of nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical weapons, as well as rockets and missiles. Another Soviet officer, a Major General Pokrovsky, stated in early 1955, "The era of local wars is over," and he said further that if Europe became an arena of war, "the war would inevitably develop into another world war." Since the Soviets are now at war, this point of view must be evaluated within the context of war. In that context, it appears to be psychologically sound and good strategy for them to insist that any war will be an all-out war. Thus, while the strategy requires that this be the party line, they supply arms and wage [limited] war by proxy where it appears to be to their advantage to do so.

Korea was an excellent example of this. I have personally seen hundreds of North Korean weapons, tanks and motor vehicles and without exception they were Soviet-manufactured equipment, much of it brand-new. In emphasizing the horrors of war, the Soviets cast themselves in the role of a gangster who intimidates and threatens the community by pointing out the frightful things that would happen if his criminal aggressions were opposed. Then when they are; the blame is shifted to the citizens of the community who are attempting to protect themselves. In simple terms, this is the current pattern of Soviet military thinking about limited wars. An examination of their military history makes quite clear that they have no hesitancy about engaging in limited war, either directly or by proxy, when it is to their advantage to do so. For years they fought in Manchuria against the Japanese. For many years they supplied arms to Mao, who fought a long-drawn-out series of battles, alternating with periods of quiet, which he has described in his book, On Protracted War.

The Finnish War was likewise a limited one. And I suppose to the Red Army, the reconquest of Hungary in 1956 was clearly a limited war.

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In summary, therefore, we should expect their writings and public statements to reflect the von Clausewitz view that in war there is no justification for the use of anything less than all-out force. They will repeatedly bring to the attention of the world their "abhorrence of war", their love of "peace", and "the horrors that war would inflict upon humanity". In the meantime, they will, continue their pattern of aggression in accordance with the teachings of Lenin. The Red Army and Navy, as instruments of the Communist party, will behave and express views fully in consonance with party leaders and, hence, with the state.

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4. From My Country, Russell W. Davenport, published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

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And now well over one hundred years since those words were written, the people of the world look to these two great powers for leadership, the United States and the USSR. The history of our people makes abundantly clear that we possess the basis for leadership. No material wealth and none of the physical achievements of democracy can substitute for what is in men's hearts.

This was followed by a campaign speech in Philadelphia on September 4, 1952. In developing the idea of the need for allies and our attitude toward the satellites, he said:

Several months later, as Secretary of State designate, in speaking to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches of

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Christ in Denver, Colorado, on December 11, 1952, Mr. John Foster Dulles said:

Finally, in the President's Inaugural Address on January 20, 1953, he expressed ten principles by which his administration would be governed. Principle No.8 stated:

Thus the record of intention seems clear. We recognized the fact that freedom was indivisible and that a barbed-wire fence or a geographic boundary could not divide people into those who were free and those who were slaves, that the world cannot continue half slave and half free. This has always been our view of freedom, and from its beginnings democracy has supported this view. In the period during World War II and immediately following that war, we referred to it as the right of self-determination.

This right still exists and mere absence of power on our part should not cause us to deny it. Sufficient power should exist in being to enable us to support it. From a military point of view, we were far from being capable of supporting the Hungarians. It must have been a bitter lesson to the people of the satellites who aspired to freedom.

Let us take the measures now that will provide us with the strength in being so that there will be no more Hungarys. If people are willing to expend their lives for this concept of democracy, then we should be willing to support them, not only willing but capable. And furthermore, we should have the moral courage

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to face the issue for what it is, a challenge to our democratic way of life. Hungary, in a small way, was a challenge as significant and as great as any challenge to the United States from the USSR.

We cannot shrink from such a challenge, or deny the challenge, if we are to survive.

Closely associated with the future of democracy is foreign economic aid. In many respects this may be more important than direct military assistance. For low standards of living, hunger and impoverishment offer the fertile fields in which the seeds of Communism flourish. We must continue to contribute technical and economic assistance to many uncommitted countries in need. Not only should our national programs be continued, but we should consider the possibility of participating jointly, through the United Nations, in programs with the Soviet Union. The success of such programs would go a long way toward the accomplishment of the goals of democracy. It may be, as Willard R. Espy has expressed it, at least a start on "A Way to Sheathe the Sword."[8] On a basis of equality in terms of strength, we should encourage cultural exchanges. Students, artists, scientists, industrialists and agriculturalists should be encouraged to visit each other's country so that they may learn to understand and appreciate the viewpoint of each other. I have found Russians that I have met to be very friendly and desirous of peaceful relations with our people. I can see nothing but good to come from a free exchange of visits, and an exchange of ideas. Let the Soviet leadership find the basis for concern of harm that may come from such an exchange if any is to be found. Certainly we should have none. There is no reason to believe that our democracy placed side by side with Communism in practice will do anything but triumph. It will unless it is weak, reactive and apprehensive.

Obviously the creation of an adequate establishment to support such a concept will not be inexpensive. There will be those who will argue that the measures needed to provide such a military establishment, particularly its cost, will be so heavy a burden upon our economy that we would lose to the Soviets in the realm of

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8. New York Herald Tribune, March 1, 1958.

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economics. This simply is not so, as has been demonstrated by a number of studies. The National Planning Association, for example, estimates that we could increase our national defense expenditures by one-half without endangering our economy. From the viewpoint of requirements Dr. Ellis A. Johnson of the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University, who is as well informed on such matters as anyone in the United States today, estimates that we should increase our defense expenditures by a rate of fifteen billion dollars more per year for an indefinite period. Of course, mere expenditure increase is not enough. We must, in addition, improve our decision-making processes in the technological areas and reduce our lead times, thus obtaining better results per dollar invested than we are now realizing. In the final analysis, the real challenge comes down to having the vision of democracy so clearly before us, and the courage necessary to support that vision, that we can with assurance build the size establishment needed-in effect, make a sacrifice and create the military establishment adequate to the challenges of the space age Without losing sight of the fundamentals-of democracy itself. It will take leadership on the part of our statesmen and some degree of sacrifice on the part of our citizens. In the long run, however, we will either make the necessary sacrifices to create the type of military establishment that can serve a positive, forward-looking concept of democracy or we will succumb to the march of Communism.

B. TACTICS IN AN EARTH WAR

The literary output of recent years dealing with policy, strategy and survival is of a high order. There has been an abundance of books on these subjects and they are, with few exceptions, of good quality. Much that has been written so far deals with strategy and policy on a global and national scale and rarely, if ever, gets down to the realities of tactics. This is understandable, since the dynamic nature of today's military technology makes it quite difficult to predict tactical trends with a high degree of accuracy. Only by being intimately associated with the military

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forces themselves, particularly with the research and development programs of the Armed Forces, may one venture the prediction of tactical trends. But for strategy and policy to be meaningful, we must understand the realities of the tactical battle itself.

Strategy is the thought, tactics are the tools. In order to understand strategic thinking and concepts of operations, one must first understand the tools and techniques of combat in the missile space age.

Combat tactics is the technique of employing the resources of war in battle. The actual functions performed in war are quite simple. They are the same whether it is one man engaged in mortal combat, a carrier task force, a field army or a bomber wing.

Hence, the simplest weapons system of all is man himself. An effective weapons system must locate its target, transmit its behavior characteristics through a central communications system, set in motion the force available to destroy the target, follow with an evaluation of the results achieved, and prepare for the next action. In their simplest forms, these functions may be defined as a communications system, firepower and mobility. Their application in battle may become highly complex. A battle will appear entirely different to different participants. It has been said that combat to a Soldier is a trade, to a commissioned officer a profession, and to a general an art. It is all of these things. Battles may extend over vast areas of the globe and involve ultramodern communications systems, hundreds of nuclear weapons, and split-second timing of decisions. Obviously the reaction time for many of the decisions are beyond man's capacity and he must entrust them to machines.

For example, in a defense against missiles, from the moment the enemy missile is launched until it strikes us we may have but few minutes, depending upon its range and time of travel, in which to. react. This reaction must include an evaluation of the target, whether or not it actually is a missile or a decoy, a determination of its trajectory and thus its destination. Next, we must determine with accuracy where it will be each fraction of a second during

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its travel, so that we can transmit instructions to our own missile exactly where in space to intercept the incoming missile. Based upon a very rapid and accurate calculation of these factors, instructions are given to our defensive missile and it is launched. It may continue to receive information during flight thus enabling it to conform to changes in the behavior of the incoming missile.

All of this must be done in minutes-in some cases in seconds and all of it must be done through electronic systems. Some decisions only man can make, and he can only make them when he understands the technical performance of the tools that he is using. Nevertheless, as complex as tomorrow's battles may appear, on analysis, the functions performed are identical with those performed in battles since the beginning of time. It is for this reason that students of warfare will often say that while tactics may change, the basic principles of war do not. We can compare the basic functional elements of battles in the past and through a knowledge of technology of the future, we may predict future battle patterns. And when we are able to predict the future pattern that battles may take, we then may define with some accuracy the role of strategy. When we know the tools, we may develop concepts for their use.

Contrary to popular belief, battles are not always won by the stronger opponent. Some of the most decisive battles have been won by the numerically inferior force. It is for this reason that an understanding of the tactics of battle are of such great importance.

Mere weight of metal, yield of explosives, or masses of men are never in themselves decisive. It is their combination into a combat efficient weapons system, cleverly employed, that brings decisive results. One of the first great decisive battles in history was that in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius and thus established Greece in control of the known world. It was fought at Arbela in 331 B.C. Alexander's forces numbered about 47,000; those of Darius exceeded a half-million. Equally decisive was a battle fought over 2,200 years later. The United States fought a naval

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engagement with Japan, the outcome of which was to determine the mastery of the Pacific Ocean and thus the ultimate destiny of both nations. It was the Battle of Midway.

It was one of those rare battles in which a numerically inferior fleet suddenly snatched victory from a superior force, and thereby changed the course of war. The destruction of two-thirds of Japan's fleet carriers knocked the bottom out of her grand tactical scheme to hold the Pacific by means of "hedgehogs" and mobile forces, and it threw her on the passive defensive. For the remainder of the war it secured the central Pacific for the United States. . . . it struck a mortal blow at Japanese prestige.[9]

History provides us an interesting study of the growth of the battle area. The size of the battle area is a function of the radius of effectiveness of the weapons involved, the mobility of the force engaged, and the ability of the commanders concerned to control those forces. A good analogy is that of the sword and the shield.

The sword is designed to penetrate to the vitals of an opponent. To defeat the sword, it was necessary to develop a shield. As the sword became increasingly effective, so did the shield. And as men organized in groups to fire team-launched weapons, they organized in groups to provide more depth to their defense. As man went through transition from hand weapons to gunpowder to nuclear weapons, the depth of the shield, thus the depth of the battle area, had to increase in relationship to the danger of the threat. And as the depth of the battle area increased, man sought to exploit new forms of mobility to make the sword more effective. As man went from foot mobility to animal mobility, to land vehicle and then air mobility, the area covered by a battle increased at an exponential rate. The Battle of Arbela did not cover much more than a dozen square miles. The Battle of Midway extended over an area of several million square miles. The Battle of Zama (202 B.C.), in which the Roman Scipio decisively defeated the Carthaginian Hannibal and thus gave mastery of the Mediterranean to the Romans, extended over but a few square

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9. A Military History of the Western World, J.F.C. Fuller.

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miles. It was one of the decisive battles of history and it led to Roman rule of the known world. The Battle of Normandy, the decisive battle for a lodgment on the Continent of Europe, fought

thousands of years later, extended over 100,000 square miles. This vast increase in the size of the battle' area had a regenerative effect: commanders insisted upon more effective means and

weapons systems to cope with the expanding battle area, and as they became available, they in turn caused the battle area to increase further. An understanding of the impact that these

weapons systems have had upon the battle area will give us some clue to the battle area of the future. Take for example, the range at which firepower is delivered. Man's first weapon was a fire-hardened, hand-carried spear. This he soon learned to throw effectively. In time he learned to add to its range by using the tensile strength of animal fibers, and while individuals retained their hand weapons, they grouped together to use team weapons. The ballista [10] was among the first and this has grown through a family of artillery weapons to to day's ballistic missile. In the recent period of its growth, man used an air vehicle to deliver a bomb, then the air vehicle as a platform from which to launch a missile, and ultimately, with surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, will rely upon the air vehicle solely for logistical support.

Considering the range at which a powerful blow could be struck against an opponent, one may express the relationship between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a proportion:

Range, 19th Century Weapons = 5 miles

Range, World War II Weapons = 500 miles

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10. The following description of the ballista is given in A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities by Dr. Oskar Seyffert, first published in 1891:

"Ballista. See Artillery.

Artillery. The machines used for sending large missiles to a great distance were supposed to have been invented in the East, and appear in Greece since 400 B.C. . . . Ballistae . . . shot stones, beams, or balls up to 162 lbs. weight, at an angle of 50 degrees The average range of the ballistae was from about 293 yards to about 503 yards. Energy for tossing the missile was acquired through "twisting strong elastic cords, the sinews of animals, or the long hair of animals or of women."

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This assumes nineteenth-century weapons to have begun in the Napoleonic period and concluded with our own Civil War. Thus, for comparative purposes, the weapons began with the smoothbore gunpowder weapons and ended with the rifled barrel, repeating-action weapons. One may take exception, on the basis of specific weapons, but for the purposes of comparison, the figures are valid. In the nineteenth century, the average ranges that a tactical commander had to consider were of about three to five miles. In those battles, he could with his' own eyes see the entire battlefield and thus he could make decisions based upon personal observation. In World War II, the ranges of weapons extended to hundreds of miles because of the availability of the air vehicle. This in turn made it possible for a tactical commander to employ his forces decisively against an opponent over an area of thousands of square miles.

While the ranges of weapons increased, their associated mobility also increased. From the foot Soldier and horse cavalryman of the nineteenth century, we went to the bombardier, the Paratrooper, the tanker and the amphibious marine of the twentieth century. Thus the relationship of the average mobility may be expressed as follows:

Mobility, 19th Century = 6 mph

Mobility, World War II = 300 mph

Tactical commanders seek to gain a quick decision. At the same time, they take all possible steps to deny the enemy the opportunity of quick decision. In defense this takes the form of a maximum dispersion of all resources consistent with good control and high degree of responsiveness. In attack this takes the form of increased mobility and depth of penetration consistent with good control and a capacity to survive countermeasures taken by the defender. Thus, again, the tactical theater continues to grow. Now with the greater ranges and unprecedented firepower of nuclear weapons and the hyper-mobility of missiles and supersonic air vehicles, the area of the tactical battle has

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increased beyond anything even dreamed of in the past. Let us examine the same functional factors and in doing so relate those to a war in the early sixties, to include 1965.

It will be the first truly Earth War. The bomber of World War III will be the ICBM. The fighter-bomber will be the IRBM and long-range artillery. Artillery will, in its larger weapons, exceed one thousand miles. It will also include a family of highly mobile, quickly responsive, shorter-range missiles, missiles ranging from several hundred miles to several thousand yards.

Communications will change radically. No longer will we be able to depend upon manned aircraft for deep battle reconnaissance. Instead, drones of exceptionally high speeds and of minimum speed will be used for target acquisition. They will be made of plastics, fiberglass and similar non-radar reflecting materials, insofar as possible. They will cover the speed spectrum from several times the speed of sound to zero-that is, to hovering drones that can remain over target areas for prolonged periods of time. In addition to drones, such as those operating within the atmosphere, drones will operate in space as part of the ICBM's systems. The first military application of satellites will undoubtedly be as reconnaissance vehicles for the ICBM system. Not only will the satellite provide accurate, timely information for an offensive ICBM strike, but it will also provide early warning in defense.

A family of reconnaissance satellites will enable a nation to keep extensive areas of the earth under almost constant surveillance.

When fully developed, with associated ground data-handling equipment, they should be able to transmit at once evidence of enemy missile launchings. Thus they will become part of a nation's early warning system. They should also be able to transmit photos of enemy launching preparations as well as to perform post-strike reconnaissance of specific areas.

General war in the ICBM age will, therefore, be a war involving the entire earth as a tactical theater. Up to the present, wars have attained the scale of being intercontinental in character.

But the ranges of reconnaissance vehicles and of weapons, and

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man's ability to use them anywhere on the earth, bring us for the first time to the threshold of an Earth War. In such a war comparative ranges and mobility in general terms would be as follows:

Ranges, World War II = 500 miles

Ranges, Earth War = 5,000 miles

Mobility is somewhat more difficult to estimate. If we assume that man and all of his resources for war would move by air in decisive tactical engagements, then mobility may be expressed as follows:

Mobility, World War II = 300 miles

Mobility, Earth War = 600 miles

Today's C-17s partially fulfil Gavin's vision but are not in enough numbers or able to drop KIWI pods with minimum complication

The mobility of man's resources in war is indicated in terms of high-speed air transport. In expressing mobility in this manner, we assume that missiles, by themselves, will not be decisive within the time frame under consideration-by 1965. To be decisive, missiles should be combined with exploitation forces. These latter should be entirely air-transported, and this includes all of the missiles accompanying them. A revolutionary change in tactical mobility is in prospect. The Army's exploitation forces should be built around new forms of air vehicles now being called "Sky Cavalry." They must be matched with highly mobile nuclear missiles and they should be able to operate over many thousands of square miles and be capable of gaining tactical decisions in a few hours.

It should be apparent from the foregoing that the world has shrunk to the area of a tactical theater The world that was beyond man's comprehension in the time of Alexander the Great, that was considered the theater of grand strategy in World War II, will have shrunk to a tactical theater by 1965. Men will be able to launch weapons from any point within the United States and to strike any point within the USSR and vice versa. Shorter-range weapons can be employed tactically from close proximity

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to an opponent, for example from five to fifteen hundred miles.

Thus, the employment of power in combat on this earth undergoes its final transition from strategic power to tactical power and thus strategy enters a new dimension, the last frontier: space and the mind of man.

An interesting example of a quick shift from a strategic to a tactical role took place in our own Civil War. On March 9, 1862, reports reached President Lincoln of the existence of an ironclad in Hampton Roads. It was the Confederate Merrimac. Upon appearing, it sank two Union vessels and drove a third aground. As the Secretary of War considered the situation with the President, he foretold the destruction of Boston and New York and suggested that the Merrimac would come up the Potomac, shell the capital and disperse Congress. The Confederates had in their hands an innovation so unique that it could not be opposed. Its employment in a strategic role was considered by both sides at once. Fortunately for the Union, a Swedish inventor had been experimenting with a cheese box-on-a-raft, the Monitor, and with much skepticism it was sent forth to challenge the Merrimac. In the engagement that followed, the Merrimac was forced to retire to Norfolk. Thus what appeared for a short span of time to be a new strategic naval weapon turned out to be after all but another tactical weapon.

Our own Strategic Air Command has undergone a similar transition. When in the mid-forties we alone possessed nuclear weapons, and SAC to make possible their air delivery, we thought of them in terms of strategic employment. In the pattern of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the philosophy of Douhet, they were to strike terror into the heart of an enemy by razing his cities and industries. Hence we planned in terms of urban bombing and the destruction of his industry and war-making capacity.

Even after we knew of the existence of the Soviet long-range bombing force, we continued, for some years, to adhere to our original concept of SAC as a strategic striking force. Only recently have we come to the full realization that its first aim, if

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it is to contribute in the most decisive manner possible to the outcome of a general war, must be to destroy the Soviet long-range bomber command. And the reverse is true: the first target of the Soviet bomber command must be the Strategic Air Command. Thus in effect, both forces become long-range tactical air commands. Now that the Soviets have an inventory of ICBMs, these will constitute their long-range striking force, the long-range artillery in the Earth War of tomorrow. In passing, it is of interest to note that in the exchange that took place in late April of 1958 between the two governments on the subject of H-bomber flights over the Arctic, Mr. Gromyko had this to say:

As the area of tactical combat has expanded, it has encompassed all four media: land, sea, air and space. Weapons used in an Earth War will certainly cross the media associated with the three services, the Army, Navy and Air Force. Thus their identification as such is of diminishing importance. Far more important are the weapons and tactics that men employ to win an Earth War regardless of the media of their origin. And overshadowing all three is the problem of space. This is not to say that man's natural habitat, the land, is not still of overriding importance to him, for it is. But to exist on land as a free man and to establish a government of free men and their institutions, he must control the media that surround him, the sea, the air and space. Since he has largely within his grasp the means of control of the sea and the air, and since space is virtually unexplored, it becomes of great significance to man's future.

Space is the theater of strategy of tomorrow-space and the human mind. Obviously a discussion of the strategy of space war is somewhat premature until we have a better understanding

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11. The Washington Post, April 30, 1958.

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of the tools. I will discuss space strategy later, but here I would like to consider the basic tools of space war. First, considering the satellite in general terms, it will provide us with a vast amount of basic information most of which will have, sooner or later, a significant impact on military space combat. The obvious problems of the environmental influence of space upon man's behavior must be solved. Already much information on heat insulation and absorption, and tolerable temperature control within a satellite has been learned from Explorer I. The Soviets have learned much about blood pressure, heartbeat, body temperatures and the general physical reactions of an animal in space flight. The effect of cosmic rays, of prolonged periods of weightlessness and the over-all psychological problem of human existence in an entirely new medium all need further study. The answers to these problems will be of direct application to space combat.

Of immediate concern to us are the special uses of satellites today. The first and obvious use of the satellite is as a reconnaissance vehicle. As pointed out earlier, no ICBM weapons system is complete without a reconnaissance element. Although few people realize it, there is no way today to give information to a missile in the United States that will cause it to arrive with accuracy at a specific geographic point in the Soviet Union. This is because the exact relation of specific points in the Soviet Union to the United States is not known except in the case of the few observatories that were in existence prior to the Red Revolution.

Obviously, if we are going to great expense to build sophisticated guidance systems in ICBMs we must be able to give equally sophisticated information to the missile at takeoff. And good accuracy is important since without it we would waste a very expensive weapon. It must be able to destroy its target even though the target may move from time to time. This requires knowing with a high degree of accuracy where the target is.

Existing cartographic data is simply not that accurate, in fact for some areas of the USSR it is virtually nonexistent. Even close to home, in the West Indies, for example, we found major

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errors in the assumed location of some of the islands whey) we first surveyed the Cape Canaveral missile range. One of the first uses of a satellite, therefore, will be to conduct a survey of the major land masses of the earth, refining the data received and transmitted back to the earth as the satellite improves in performance. I am personally convinced that the targets that will be of the greatest importance to the West, and that will be worth the investment of a very expensive ICBM, will be the targets that threaten our own existence most. These are the Soviet long-range missiles. And these, either in whole or in part, are now mobile, and they will be entirely mobile as propellants and techniques for launching increase in efficiency. Thus, to employ profitably an ICBM will require accurate and timely intelligence and this can only be secured through the use of a reconnaissance satellite. As the reconnaissance airplane had to serve the bomber, a reconnaissance missile will have to serve the ICBM. They are complementary and essential ingredients of a complete system. And finally, the most efficient type of reconnaissance missile at this time appears to be one that accurately orbits a useful satellite.

The first requirement of a reconnaissance satellite is to accomplish a rough survey of the earth's surface. Thus we will determine with accuracy the over-all shape of the earth. Next an accurate determination of the relative location of major land masses must be made. Finally, in the very near future it will be possible to place a satellite in orbit that will be able to conduct detailed photography. Its accuracy should be such that it will be possible to distinguish separate aircraft on an airfield.

Gavin was right. Here's an example from today. EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan can be spotted using google satellite earth feature available to anyone with internet access

Satellite photography will require the development of ground handling and processing equipment and this may be far more difficult and expensive than the launching of the satellite itself. With a satellite circling the earth roughly every hour and a half, thousands upon thousands of photographs, many of them of little value because of cloud cover, will have to be processed. Automatic systems for accepting or rejecting any portion of the photographs will have

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to be developed so they can be handled quickly.

In addition to reconnaissance satellites orbiting at a speed that will bring them over the United States with some frequency, there will be a need for satellites that remain stationary relative to a given point on the earth. Although it may take considerable development effort, it will be possible to place in orbit a satellite moving at the same speed as the earth's rate of rotation. It will no doubt have to possess a small propulsion capability of its own so that once in orbit it can, in response to signals from the earth, adjust its position in space. Such a satellite should maintain its orbital station for an indefinite period of time. It will be so far from the earth's surface, however, that it appears unlikely at this time that it could be useful for reconnaissance purposes. A family of such satellites properly placed could provide a network of radio and TV stations for world-wide program relays.

The military and commercial uses of a satellite for communications purposes are most attractive. At the present time, the frequency spectrum of our terrestrial radio communication networks are very crowded. Communications facilities, Such as cable systems, are very costly to maintain. It appears to be economically worth-while to undertake the development of a communications satellite. Overflying major communications centers, let us say Paris and Washington, on an accurate time schedule, it could pick up and store an enormous volume of communications. These would be automatically played back over the receiving station, again let us say Washington. A similar communications service could be provided anywhere on the earth. Our industrialists now believe that this would be an economically profitable way to communicate in the future. From a military point of view it has tremendous potential.

Currently there is much speculation about the possible uses of a satellite as a weapons carrier. Obviously the mere release of a warhead will accomplish nothing since it will cruise along in orbit with the platform. However, by giving but a little propulsion to the warhead, it could be directed back into the earth's atmos-

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phere. At this point the problem of re-entry would become as severe as that of an ICBM warhead. The solutions applied to the ICBM warhead problem will apply to the orbital re-entry body.

Since we intend to place a man into space and bring him back to earth under tolerable and accurately controlled conditions, these problems must all be solved. When they are solved there appears to be no reason why a warhead could not be placed on the earth with the accuracy with which we intend to return man.

Next, one can foresee the day when a manned orbital vehicle will be able to transmit guidance signals to a returning object so as to guide it with some precision into a selected target area. Thus, although it is far from feasible now, we cannot afford to overlook the possibility of an orbital vehicle launching an attacking warhead. It will be argued, with ample substance, that the earth is a far better launching platform. It is, and it will no doubt remain so for some time. However, when we reduce the antimissile-missile problem to manageable proportions, the ability to launch objects from a satellite may well play a part in the effectiveness of our over-all system. In summary, therefore, we cannot afford to dismiss the possibility of an object's being launched from a space vehicle as being of no significance.

This brings us to the next aspect of space combat-whether or not we should develop a satellite to intercept a satellite. It raises some delicate legal problems that deserve much more study than they have been given so far. The subject is treated comprehensively and well in Spacepower.[12] It is inconceivable to me that we would indefinitely tolerate Soviet reconnaissance of the United States without protest, for clearly such reconnaissance has an association with an ICBM program. It is necessary, therefore, and I believe urgently necessary, that we acquire at least a capability of denying Soviet overflight-that we develop a satellite interceptor. On the basis of studies that have been conducted so far, this appears possible, although it will be quite a difficult problem

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12. Spacepower by Donald Cox and Michael Stoiko, John C. Winston Company, 1958.

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until man himself operates on a platform in space.

Military operations on the earth-not only tactical operations but strategic planning-are very much affected by weather. Excess rainfall and prolonged droughts have a definite effect upon a nation's economy and thus affect its war-making capacity. It appears at this time that much could be learned about the weather patterns on the earth through the use of weather satellites. It has been suggested that man may be able to control the weather at some time in the future. In the meantime we should undertake a study of global weather patterns through the use of satellite vehicles.

Finally, if we are to control space, we must undertake the exploration of the moon and the planetary system as a matter of highest national priority. A preliminary step in such an undertaking is the establishment of a manned space station. There have been numerous proposals about how to do this. Most agree that the basic problem is to develop a main thrust unit of large enough size that big payloads of lightweight construction material can be placed with accuracy in orbit. Man can then build his station and when it is complete and inhabitable, use it as a platform for further space exploration. The military significance of being able to establish and maintain an inhabited space station is obvious.

The tactics of space warfare must begin, therefore, as usual with survival. We must acquire sufficient knowledge and equipment to protect ourselves, specifically a capability to intercept a satellite.

We must develop the equipment and train the men to operate the equipment in space regardless of any obstacle, man-made or otherwise.

I am of the personal conviction that the space age offers for the first time a real prospect of lasting peace, for despite all that has been written so far about the tactics of space combat, if this planet is to remain inhabitable by man, a space program must be developed under the United Nations. We should establish, as a matter of high priority, a United States space command directly under the Department of Defense. Its full utilization should be

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made available to the United Nations. We should ask that our Allies and the Soviets also contribute to such a UN program to the extent of their ability. If the exploration and control of space can be carried out under the auspices of the United Nations, we will not have to concern ourselves with space war; instead, the exploration of space can be conducted for the peaceful purposes of mankind.

In the handling of earth forces, the problems that confront the military tactician are tremendous. Mobility will change radically. Missiles offer us a new order of mobility, particularly for high-priority cargo. For quite a few years, the need for missiles for purposes other than transportation will be so great that the transportation field will probably not receive the attention it deserves.

It does seem clear, however, that initially a combination of chemical and missile propulsion systems should enable man to move high-priority cargo, say from Washington to London, in about thirty minutes. Between now and 1965, however, the form of mobility of most significance to us will be air mobility.

Gavin's KIWI pod carrying transport from Airborne Warfare

We have hardly begun to exploit the combat potential of the airplane. Tactical decisions will be won or lost depending upon how well we learn to understand the uses of the air vehicle in the immediate future. It is essentially a vehicle of transportation and every missile and every gram of fissionable material must be flown. "Fire brigades," of course, must be flown, for in dealing with limited wars the amount of force required is a function of reaction time. The quicker one responds, the less the force required. Long delay presages a long and costly war. The air vehicle should be used tactically to provide the means for dispersion and quick reaction.

The Army has a peculiar requirement for the air vehicle that is just beginning to be understood. It is Sky Cavalry. Since the beginning of recorded history, man has sought to gain a mobility advantage over his opponent in land combat. The Greeks demonstrated this in their basic tactical organizations, as did the Romans after them. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of the

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potential in war of a mobility innovation matched with ruthless aggression was that of Genghis Khan. In our time, a new form of land mobility has been developed, the gasoline engine. Among the few who foresaw its potential were members of the German Army in the 1930's. Hence the blitzkrieg that destroyed Poland in a few days, despite the predictions of the experts, overran most of Europe and came to the brink of defeating the West.

Now we are in the air age and as the potential of the air vehicle becomes understood, we can foresee its marriage with tactical nuclear firepower giving us an innovation without precedent in military history. We can foresee it, but doing something about it is another matter. Tragically, in the years between World War II and Korea, we neglected it. If we had had the vision to see, and the courage to venture in our research and development programs, we could have had a tactical mobility in Korea that would have enabled us literally to run circles around our opponents. As General Walker's armies moved north towards the Yalu, blindly going from road bend to road bend and hill to hill, they were ambushed by an army that depended largely upon foot and horse mobility. Technically, this situation was inexcusable. Tactically, with the equipment at hand, it was unavoidable. Even at the time of the Inchon landing, when MacArthur established a lodgment near the vitals of the North Korean forces, it took a week for them to link up by tank and foot with the remainder of the 8^th Army going north from Tageu.

One of the most striking aspects of man's military past is his persistent search for the technical means to get an edge on his opponent in mobility. When he was successful, and especially when he could organize elements of varying mobility into a cohesive combat team, he was successful in combat. When he failed to solve the technical problem created by his needs, he failed in combat. Mobility offers greater promise of innovation than any of the other functional areas of tactics. I know of no area in our military programs that deserves more attention at this time. Hyper-mobile forces matched with tactical nuclear weapons, from the

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shoulder-fired infantryman's weapon to medium-range missiles, supported by long-range missiles, will be the key to the control of the land masses on this earth. Sky Cavalry teamed with drone surveillance forces offers our military establishment the greatest innovation in tactical combat since the beginning of history.

Nuclear firepower will, to an increasing extent, complement mobility. As our research continues in making "cleaner" weapons the military usefulness of nuclear weapons will increase. Likewise, as their size diminishes they will be more combat-worthy.

We can see quite clearly now that the time is not far distant when tactical nuclear weapons will be in every echelon of the military establishment. Then the West will need ten times the ten thousand figure of tactical weapons that has been frequently quoted. It will, if it is to control its own destiny in the space age.

So far, this discussion of tactics as a function of earth power has dealt mainly with land warfare. Obviously with by far the largest part of the planet consisting of sea, sea power is of at least as great or possibly greater significance. Rapidly increasing in importance is our submarine program. While a member of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group some years ago, I became very impressed with both the importance of submarines and with Russian progress in submarine development. With the valor of ignorance, as a Soldier, I suggested then that all combat vessels should be submersible. I still believe that they should be and that our Naval Research Program should concentrate on the submarine-missile problem. It is not going to be as easy as much of the current press output would lead one to believe. For a submarine is quite vulnerable. Present detection systems can locate and track submarines at very great distances. They must move to live and while moving, they are detectable. Furthermore, the effects of nuclear weapons under water are, in some respects, greater than on land. The Soviet submarine threat and our own awareness of current technology suggest that we should concentrate a great deal of our naval research effort in this field. The

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control of the seas is essential to our collective security policy and thus to our survival.

Admitting the importance of mobility and firepower, and of man's ability to control both of these on the earth and in space, we still must recognize that the most important factor of all is man himself. Our weapons systems will never be a bit better than the men who design them, make them, and man them. And more men rather than fewer will be required in the missile-space age than in the past. Writing on this problem in the Army-NavyAir Force Register of May 9, 1957, William H. Stoneman said:

It is possible that more troops would be needed to supply and operate a larger number of individual units than were needed to run an army on the old divisional system.

The firm stand taken by General Lauris Norstad, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, against further cuts in NATO ground forces on the continent indicates that he and his advisers think the answer to the big question may be "more troops."

Several months later in an article in the United States Air Force Times entitled, "Missiles to Need as Many Men as Bomber Units, Planners Say," the author concluded:

The whole success of the mission and the possible outcome of the "push-button war" hinge on the ability of thousands of technicians to do their individual jobs right before the count-down. Ironically, planners say, the most mechanized war the world has ever known promises to be the most demanding too on human capabilities.

Unpalatable to many as the conclusion may be, clearly we will need more men, and better scientifically trained men, in the future than in the past.

In conclusion, in the missile-space age the earth will become a tactical theater, and combat in space will have begun. Missiles will be the dominant form of firepower and air mobility will provide the key to tactical success in land warfare. Through air mobility we must discover the innovations that will give us the margin of advantage we need to win in land combat. Control

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of the seas, so essential to our collective security program, must be achieved through an effective submarine-antisubmarine program. Space will be of overriding importance and we must exploit the military potential of a comprehensive satellite program as a matter of highest national priority. Finally, more men and better scientifically trained men will be needed than in the past. And our achievements in the field of applied tactics will be no better than the men who create our weapons systems and the men who man them.

C. STRATEGY AND SPACE

"All warfare is based on deception." --SUN TZU

"Mystify, mislead, and surprise." --"STONEWALL" JACKSON

The first object of strategy is to make tactical battles unnecessary. The measure of success of strategy therefore is the degree to which battle becomes unnecessary. The second object is to have one's resources so disposed as to win if battle does occur. Since most writing on strategy has been done by Soldiers, there has been a tendency toward preoccupation with battle itself. To many military writers, strategy is considered hardly more than the interrelationship of battles. In its simplest form, a defensive battle may be fought in one area while an offensive strike is made in another. A generally accepted definition of strategy that reflects this point of view is: "As a rule, strategy concerns itself with those larger-scale measures which serve to bring the forces into play at the decisive point under the most favorable conditions possible, while tactics relates to what is done in the engagement itself. Strategy might be called the science of generalship, while tactics is that of handling troops." The idea that a successful strategy is one that makes physical battle unnecessary is not new. J.F.C. Fuller, in describing the durability of the Eastern Roman Empire that lasted for a thousand

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For many centuries strategy consisted of what we would consider today hardly more than a higher form of tactics. Gradually, as war became more technical, and thus more elaborate, preparations for its conduct had to be made and strategy encompassed many other things. In Napoleon's time, the problems of sustenance for men and animals, money, the attitude of other states toward the war and particularly the movement of forces, all had to be carefully considered before tactical battle was sought. And as war became more complex, the realm encompassed by strategy became greater.

Now in the mid-twentieth century, we have come to the state in the evolution of warfare where the world is hardly more than one large tactical theater. As the realm of tactics has expanded,

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Obviously we do not want to embark upon an effort to control our free press, but without doing so, we can do more than has been done. From the viewpoint of one who has seen and been part of the interworkings of our government in Washington, there is clear and compelling evidence of lack of co-ordination on the psychological aspects of important national projects. Notable among the most recent, as I have already pointed out, were the failure to appreciate the psychological importance of an early satellite launching, the failure to appreciate the damage that would result from a highly publicized failure on our part when this

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could have been avoided, and the failure to make the most of our own early launching. And these failures are as serious as failures in tactical battle since they represent to the Soviets victories in strategic warfare which if repeated often enough will lead to strategic victory and thus the tactical battle may be avoided, or if unavoidable, certainly won.

The object of war in the abstract, of strategy, is the disarming of the enemy. The best illustration of this strategy in practice today is the insistence that our NATO allies, specifically Western Germany, not be given nuclear weapons. Now nuclear weapons are as much a part of to day's arsenal as gunpowder was yesterday. In fact, no modem air defense is possible without the use of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the realization of the importance of nuclear weapons to a modem military establishment, on the part of the Soviets, is quite apparent in the weapons that they now display and in the statements of their military and political leaders. They insist, however, upon the denial of nuclear weapons to Western Europe, and also at times on a ban on missiles. In a trade visit to Bonn in the spring of 1958, Anastas I. Mikoyan, the Kremlin's No.2 man, said: "If the Bonn Federal Republic is free of atomic weapons and missiles. . . the Soviet Union, even in the event of the outbreak of a war in which the Bonn Republic is a participant, will refrain from employing nuclear weapons and missiles against. . . the Bonn Republic" And while the Soviet propaganda line has hammered home the horrors of a nuclear holocaust in Western Europe, they have preached abroad the likelihood of a nuclear war being inadvertently triggered by placing weapons in the hands of the West Germans. At the same time, their own military establishment continues to receive nuclear weapons in abundance and in many categories. The impact of their propaganda line has not been without results and as responsible a paper as the London Economist on April 12, 1958, in a reference to NATO strategic planners wrote: "In the particular case of Germany, the military advantage of having the new weapons in German hands looks

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minor, while the political arguments against it appear decisive." In the light of history, if the Soviets succeed in denying nuclear weapons to the strongest ground force in Europe, the German forces, they will have achieved one of the most remarkable strategic victories in military history. It is rare indeed that a strategy has been so successful as to disarm an opponent. Yet, in this case, it could happen and if the German forces are denied nuclear weapons, Marshal Zhukov's boast will certainly come true: the Soviet forces will be on the English Channel in forty-eight hours, well equipped with an abundance of tactical nuclear weapons.

Americans are innately confident that they can win any psychological battle with the Soviets. Sooner or later, most of us are convinced, the truth will come out, and adherence to the truth and avoidance of gross lies, even for momentary propaganda advantage, is the best policy. After all, Hitler and Goebbels were masters of the big-lie technique and we brought them to their end. This may be true, but our success or failure in this realm of strategy will not be known until either system triumphs. We must do more now.

There is another element of strategy, however, that is finite and measurable now. It is technology. As war becomes increasingly complex, technology becomes more and more important. In fact, if the strategy of the Soviets or of the West were to be decisively successful without tactical battle, it would be in the field of technology, for technology contains all of the elements short of war itself. Economics, natural resources, decision-making and lead time, and superior weapons systems themselves are all part of technology. Each, if not properly understood and carefully planned, could directly contribute to strategic defeat.

Let us first consider economics. It has been said that we are pricing ourselves out of survival, just as we are pricing ourselves out of the world's markets. Our high standard of living, with accompanying high wages, is fine at home, but places us in a bad position in competitive world markets. In comparison, with their

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low standard of living, the Soviets have been able not only to produce thousands upon thousands of tanks, armored personnel cars and other conventional weapons, but they have been able to beat us in the jet-airplane development race and in the missile satellite race. In the meantime, our own weapons systems have become so costly that in order to support but a few, we have had to deny ourselves many. Speaking to a group of businessmen in Washington on March 4, 1958, Assistant Secretary of Defense W. J. McNeill said:

He went on to say that the most advanced type of aircraft now under experimentation, the X-15, would probably cost in excess of $100 million per plane. Comparable cost increases prevail in the missile field. For example, an Atlas deployed will cost about $17.5 million, including a proportionate share of the fixed launching base cost. A short-range mobile missile, the Pershing, of about five hundred miles range will cost one-half million dollars. Since it is generally agreed that we cannot exceed investing a certain amount of our gross national product in national defense without doing harm to the national economy, it becomes of overriding importance that we make our technical decisions well and that we make them quickly. Failure to do so could well do critical

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harm to our economy and failure to do so in time will give us weapons systems that are obsolete, and thus we may lose without a shot being fired. There is considerable evidence to support the belief that we could increase our present rate of defense spending without hurting our national economy. The National Planning Association in a press release of December 29, 1957, stated that "defense spending, if necessary, can be increased to approximately $54 billion [13] by 1960 without the need for increased taxation to balance the government's budget." The National Planning Association report found "that even if national security spending increased from $42 billion in 1957 to $54 million in 1960, there would remain in the economy sufficient normal production capacity to enable business to increase its capital formation in response to the greater capital requirements of enlarged defense programs, consumers to increase their consumption at a rate slightly higher than that of the past decade, and governments-federal, state, and local-to make some expansion in their services." By increasing the tax rate, the defense expenditures could be raised to $64 billion and provide a program that would "expand the stepped-up program of air-power and guided missiles and would permit a significant increase in strength for all the other national defense forces and possibly a comprehensive civil defense program, including industrial relocation." Actually, some of our most important missile programs have been slipping steadily because of the diminishing value of the dollar and the increased cost of labor and scientific help. It appears, therefore, that an increased investment of our gross national product into our defense establishment is both necessary and possible without disrupting the economy of the country. However, this is but a small part of the problem. Far more important than dollars invested are the decisions made, and the timeliness of these decisions, and decision-making

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13. Statement made by the President at a press conference on September 3, 1957: "I have come to believe that a very fine and adequate defense for the United States can at present prices be sustained-with an expenditure program, if it can be planned in advance, at about $38,000,000,000."

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in military technology is a very complex business. For, again, technology is part of strategic warfare and the decisions are just as complex, and the results that depend upon them just as critical as any battle decisions ever made.

In making a decision to create a new weapons system, we must consider many things. Foremost among them must be national military policy, enemy weapons systems, our resources, our economy and the state of technology. All of these are variables that occur in many combinations in the decision-making process. Let us consider the first: national military policy. It reflects national political policy and if our political policy is positive and affirmative in its view, then this factor is not too difficult to weigh.

On the other hand, if national policy is passive and committed exclusively to containment, it is by its very nature reactive. The initiative is with the enemy and we tend to respond to his programs. This is very dangerous in the strategy of technology. For technological initiative in the hands of an enemy enables him to deceive, mislead and ultimately surprise us. Mere deception itself can be tolerated if the other factors are preponderantly in our favor. That is, if we have an abundance of natural resources compared to an enemy, and if our economy is in a much better state, we can afford the loss of the initiative without too great a concern.

Our natural resources situation is far from favorable. From a "have" nation, we are rapidly becoming a ''have-not" nation. We have less than 7 per cent of the world's population occupying 8 per cent of the world's land area, yet we consume almost half of the Free World's natural resources. And this rate is rising.

Prefacing an excellent analysis of our situation in the New York Times in December of 1957, Mr. Richard Rutter wrote:

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The survival of the nation is involved. An assured supply of iron ore, petroleum, natural gas, metals, coal and a host of other materials is essential to the strength of the American economy. Without these, the great industrial machine would come to a halt. It would be impossible to match or excel the Soviet Union's dramatic technological advances. The national security would vanish overnight, the standard of living would collapse and the United States as we know it would be no more.

So great is our dependence upon foreign supply that there are but two metals that we have in sufficiency, magnesium and molybdenum. Iron, tin, tungsten and petroleum are among the critical items for which we must depend upon foreign supply to meet our needs. Eighty-five to 90 per cent of the world's reserves of tungsten is under the control of Communist China.

Seventy per cent of the known petroleum reserves is in the highly sensitive and vulnerable Middle East. And finally, this situation, rather than improving, will get worse with time. Thus, an awareness of it imposes serious limitations upon our decisions.

Our high standard of living, with an accompanying high cost of production, makes abundantly clear that our decisions must be made with considerable care since we cannot afford many of the things that we would like to have. Thus, operating within a fixed budget, we are particularly sensitive to deception since the harm that we could suffer -would be much greater than that which we could inflict upon the USSR.

Finally, the lead time in the technological race has been increasing and this is alarming. Dr. Ellis A. Johnson, Director of the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University, has written: "During World War II our lead times were about 2 years. Now the Russian lead time is five years. Our lead time is ten years."[14] In a paper published by the Stanford Research Institute, "The Lead Time Race", the statement is made: "The central problem in the survival of the United States today is the lead time race with the Soviet Union for weapons superiority." Thus it would appear quite clear that in the technological decision-

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14. U.S. News and World Report, January 31, 1958.

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making processes of strategy, we are at a great disadvantage.

The Soviet lead time is decidedly shorter, and their controlled economy gives them greater freedom in allocation of resources in support of decisions. And finally, having the initiative they can, in "Stonewall" Jackson's words, "mystify, mislead, and surprise." For example, there is a considerable quantity of intelligence to support the view, a view held by a number of people in the intelligence business, that in the competition to develop Long Range Striking Forces, the Soviets have led us to believe that they were building a sizable long-range bomber force, whereas, in fact, they were investing most of their national product for their long-range forces in long-range ballistic missiles. The Soviets merely built and displayed before Western observers sufficient long-range manned bombers to cause apprehension, and consequent reaction on our part. We in turn embarked upon a very expensive long-range manned bomber program. If this actually has been the Soviet strategy, then billions of dollars have been invested in aircraft that will never be used in combat. If we had spent those billions on missiles and satellites, we would be well in the forefront of the missile-space race today. The canceled Navaho program, amounting to 700 million dollars, and the discarded B-36s suggest that there may be some validity to the theory. Of course, we could not afford to ignore the bomber threat entirely and this is not to say that we should not have built bombers, for it is likely that the Soviets would have moved with much greater freedom if they believed that we lacked a capacity to retaliate by bombers. But there is a considerable amount of evidence to support the view that Soviet displays and Soviet statements have been cleverly made with a view to cause us to continue to invest in a weapons system that they themselves know to be obsolescent. In this connection, Mr. Khrushchev, after announcing in 1957 that the manned bomber belonged in a museum, reversed himself and a report to the New York Times from Moscow on March 21, reports: "Nikita S. Khrushchev

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has substantially amended his stated position on the relative roles of manned aircraft and missiles in modem arsenals." The question remains unanswered, whether or not he was still engaging in technological strategy. The odds are that he was. Technological strategy offers us one of the most interesting challenges that we have ever known. This is a technological age and the mastery of technology will determine our fate in the future. It is absolutely fundamental that we understand technology, and the war of technology, and plan carefully for participation in this kind of war if we are to survive.

World War II brought to our attention a number of examples of the role that technology can play. We came close to defeat in anti-submarine warfare but our scientists and our Navy won that technical battle for us. In the field of mine laying alone, the competition was very close and as we went from magnetic to acoustic to influence mines, the scientists on both sides sought to mislead and outmaneuver each other. In an AP report from London on January 24, 1958, an account is given of British success in deceiving the Nazis. Although it is applied technology rather than strategy, it gives a brief account of some of the work done by Professor Reginald Jones, Chief of the Scientific Intelligence Section of the Royal Air Force:

Perhaps his most important feat was the J-beam hoax.

"When our bombers started using the C-beam, the Germans were

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It would appear to be entirely possible for a nation to develop and carry out a well-conceived strategic plan in technology that could cause an opponent to waste vast amounts of critical resources.

War has become much more complex since World War II and it has reached the stage where technology is a special field of applied strategy. It deserves special treatment at our highest scientific and military institutions. For example, we should bring together a group of our topflight scientists, industrialists and military people for the purpose of conducting two-sided technological war games. This could be done at our National War College, let us say, during the summer when a regular class is not present. The group should be organized into three subgroups:

a composite science-industry-military team representing Nation "A," a similar team representing Nation "B," and an umpire or control group. The control group should be picked with care and they should do considerable preparatory work before the meeting. The team representing Nation "A" should be organized with a team leader and it should be physically separated from Nation "B" during the conduct of the war game. This is an important point, for many of our present so-called "war games" on scientific matters are conducted on blackboards with all participants present and indulging in a free exchange of ideas. The element of competition and human judgment in decision-making is badly slighted.

Once the teams are properly placed, they should be given situations out of our past history with which to deal, for example, antisubmarine warfare. The control group should provide the teams representing Nations "A" and "B" with actual historical

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data, following the exact situations that developed during the war. When both sides understand the problem, variables can be introduced, requiring different solutions. The next phase would be the presentation of current problems in technology. When the teams are working well, either nation may then provide the other, through the control group, with false information to cause the other to make bad strategic decisions. The team representing each nation should be required to make decisions in the light of information given it by the control group. Computers would be used for much of the calculations, but the elements of competition and human decision should be ever-present. Such training should be projected as far into the space age as it is possible to go, for sooner or later it is in the realm of space that the great battles of technology will be won or lost.

From such a technological war game, much can be derived.

Among other things, it offers us a prospect of recovering the technological initiative and this we must do. We will never survive if we continue to be exclusively preoccupied with the technological initiative of the Soviets. We must think for ourselves and this is a practice that we can only acquire through training, and if we are to develop a sound strategy of technology, our considerations must transcend the problems of any service, or of science, or of industry. It must bring them all together.

A technological war game such as this can be conducted under the auspices of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. There may be those who would say that this is being done now in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. This is not quite so. Numerous symposiums, conferences and summer study groups are held, but none of them has the element of competition between select teams representing science, industry and the military. Far too many of them merely consist of round-table discussions, forums and just plain talk sessions.

The following are examples of the type of problems that lend themselves to study. Let us begin with the problem closest to us -self-defense, defense of the United States against missile attack,

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launched from either land or sea. An analysis of a Soviet missile program should give us our first clue to the type of target with which we must deal. We must make an analysis based upon available intelligence and then make our own estimate of what Soviet technology might be able to accomplish. Based upon this we can then determine the technical programs needed to provide an adequate defense. We must then place ourselves in the position of the Soviets and in the light of the defense measures that we are planning, introduce variants in the Soviet system to mislead and defeat our defensive measures. In the case of a defense against Soviet long-range missiles, these are many and highly complex. They can include for example decoys, spoofing, [15] countermeasures and finally counter-countermeasures. If all possible measures were taken to defeat an ICBM attack without a thorough evaluation of the over-all defense problem, we could expend a major portion of our defense budget on this problem alone and still fail to provide an adequate defense. The DEW line is an example of a defense that was established, but which because of the time lost in decision-making, and because of the lead time, proved to be too late for the purpose intended. Designed to provide defense against manned bombers at specific altitudes, it has become operational at a time when our greatest threat will be Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. This is not to say that the investment was a total loss, for it was not. Much that was learned can be applied to our antimissile-missile defense and many of the facilities can contribute directly to that defense.

However, with the advantage of hindsight, we see now that we should have thought of defense and foreseen the need for a DEW line many years earlier, or given more attention to the problems of defense against the missile and less to the manned bomber.

The problem of defending against submarine-launched missiles

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15. Spoofing consists of making attacks against a defense system to cause it to react, thus disclosing its characteristics and enabling an enemy to take appropriate countermeasures to defeat it.

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Unused USAF Thor IRBM that Gavin rightly suggests be used as defense against submarine-launched ballistic missiles as continental U.S. defense

is equally as challenging as that of land-based missiles. At the present we appear to be relying upon our own submarines to detect Soviet missile-carrying submarines thus hoping to defeat them at sea. Our own nuclear-propelled missile-carrying submarines will be very expensive, and all things considered, they will be as vulnerable at sea as the Soviet submarines themselves.

It would appear obvious that it would be to our advantage to examine the feasibility of using surface-to-surface missiles associated in a weapons system with land-based sonar detection systems to defeat Soviet missile-bearing submarines. Since our IRBMs and mid-range missiles will be in storage, it would be of little additional cost to have a number of them so placed that they could be used against hostile, threatening submarines. Thus from not too many locations-on the capes and on the islands in the oceans bordering the North American land area-we could provide surface-to-surface missiles coverage of most of the Atlantic and a large portion of the Pacific. Under such protection, our own submarines could have considerable freedom of action.

The economic, technical and military soundness of this proposal deserves the most thorough technological evaluation. Science, industry and our military should all be brought together to wargame technological challenges such as this. Again, it would be possible to invest mistakenly a sizable portion of our national product in a defense against such missiles with little actual return.

So far, this discussion of technological strategy has concerned itself with measures to be taken in our own defense. A nation's technological strategy, however, must go beyond this if it is to win. We must develop a strategic plan of our own. We must project our thinking into the future so far that we can foresee technological patterns that we must follow if we are to survive.

At the same time, we must develop plans that will cause a would-be aggressor to be misled and make bad technological judgments. Hence, if our plan is successful, we can survive without physical battle. This is the real challenge and yet one en-

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tirely in keeping with the forward-looking concept of democracy itself. It is particularly applicable to space, for in space we bring together all the problems of psychology, economics and applied military power.

An interesting illustration of a Soviet technological decision exists in Sputnik III. Prior to the launching of Sputnik III, there was a great deal of speculation among our scientists and military people about what the Soviets would do next. Based upon the size of Sputnik II, it was evident that the Soviets had a missile engine with a thrust much greater than anything that we had in operational use. Under the assumption that Sputnik III would be an improvement over Sputnik II in size and performance, it was thought most probable that the Soviets would go to the moon.

Many believed that they would either circumnavigate the moon or impact upon it. Since they presumably had the capability of doing so, but instead launched a much larger satellite with a predictably short life, this had considerable significance. It would appear that their decision was to develop a reconnaissance satellite for military purposes, for psychological as well as tactical reconnaissance, rather than expend their resources on a moon probe at that time. We will be faced with similar decisions.

But if we are strong enough and wise enough to avoid World War III, we shall continue to engage the Soviets in an ideological race in which the stakes are the minds of men of the uncommitted nations. In that ideological race, outer space may well be the proving ground on which the uncommitted people of the world will judge whether the democratic free enterprise system or the communist system is superior.[16]

In order to win, the strategic initiative must be ours. We appear to be losing it, but we can regain it by proper study and the selection and training of imaginative and far-sighted scientists and officers. We can develop a strategy of technology that will regain the technological initiative for the West. With an all-out effort,

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16. Testimony of Dr. J. Sterling Livingstone, Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, December 16, 1957.

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it could be done, possibly in five and certainly in ten years. But it will take an all-out effort. Of one thing we may be sure, the nation that first achieves the control of outer space will control the destiny of the human race.

Military and Political Thinking in the United States

To be complete any discussion of strategy should consider service attitudes. Judging by the questions they ask, and much that they read in the newspapers, many people seem to believe that service attitudes contribute more to the molding of national strategy than any other single thing.

The problem of service attitudes and differences of opinion on the fundamentals of military policy must be perplexing to the average American. "Overwhelmed with conflicting facts, figures, theories, predictions, and arguments from generals, admirals, congressmen, the State Department, and the Alsops, the intelligent layman tends to view defense policy as a confused and impenetrable chaos in which the real alternatives of policy are known only to the initiated few." [17] To add to the confusion in the minds of the public, generals and admirals differ among themselves. Each draws upon his own experience and quotes his own statistics to prove the correctness of his point of view. Finally, within the services themselves, senior officers frequently disagree.

The Tactical Air Command people often are at loggerheads with the Strategic Air Command, and those who would concentrate the Navy's effort on an underwater Navy conflict directly with those who desire a carrier Navy. The Army has its partisans also and there are those who would emphasize air mobility at the expense of everything else, while others would put our emphasis on sustained combat and heavy armored equipment. Overshadowing the interests of all the services are the problems of missiles and space. There is little wonder then that the average citizen has

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17. Samuel P. Huntington, "Radicalism and Conservatism in National Defense Policy," Journal of International Affairs, Columbia University, Volume III, No.2, 1954.

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difficulty understanding the fundamentals of our national defense policy, the differences of opinion that exist and the real reasons therefor.

National defense policy presents to the intelligent layman a challenge significantly different from tl1at of domestic policy. Give the informed citizen the names of Robert Taft, Leverett Saltonstall, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, and Norman Thomas, and he will have no trouble in arranging them in a politically rational progression in terms of their respective viewpoints on domestic policy. Not only that, but the informed citizen will also have no difficulty in locating his own position in this progression. We have all grown accustomed to thinking of domestic policy in terms of a right-left, conservative-liberal continuum. [18]

Military policy covers as broad a spectrum and encompasses comparable divergencies of view as our political policy. This should not be surprising, since after all, military policy merely reflects political policy and, in application, is a continuation of politics. Therefore, with an understanding of our military policy, one should be able to place the names of Radford, LeMay, Twining, Burke, Taylor and Bradley in a rational progression in terms of their respective viewpoints on military policy. And having done so, one should be able to locate his own position within this progression with a reasonable exactness.

Many people believe that each service develops and follows a party line, and requires its members to adhere to that party line.

As a friend of mine said not long ago, "Scratch a member of the Air Force and out comes an airman, they are all of the same point of view and say the same things." This is not so. Within each service there are strong differences of opinion on many of the fundamental issues. I have had long service in the Department of Defense and in joint commands where I have had occasion to discuss exhaustively many of our fundamental military problems.

With few exceptions, men in uniform think for themselves and in the higher staffs they give you their best objective judgments.

If I were to generalize on this problem at all, I would say the more intelligent the individual, the more objective he is. Further,

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18. Ibid.

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if I were to place our military spokesmen in categories, I would

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The foregoing represents two very definite schools of thought that now exist within the military establishment. Officers of all services are scattered throughout both. However, in general the Army and Navy associate with the liberal school and the Air Force with the conservative school. There are, of course, many combinations of the above but the majority of officers are intellectually committed to either of the two schools. Finally, there are extremists who depart from either. On the liberal side there are some who would have a much greater commitment to our

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Allies of all types of weapons and resources than we can possibly afford, and among the conservatives there are those who would favor a preventive war right now, a "destroy them in their nests" anticipatory-retaliatory war. It is interesting to note that there is, in general terms, a political party affiliation with these military groups. Generally, the liberals and the Democrats side with the liberal military group and, again generally, those far to the right politically and the Republicans tend to side with the conservative military group.

Closely akin to any concept of what a military establishment in this country should be are the doctrinal attitudes of the services themselves. Much has been written about service attitudes, interests and interservice rivalry. And a great deal has been said and written about the over-all management of the nation's defense establishment. They deserve a word.

Interservice Rivalry

Interservice rivalry, long a subject of discussion-and speculation, has come in for much more attention since the Sputniks.

Some columnists have attributed our failure to beat the Soviets into space to interservice rivalry, a view in which they frequently get support from people in the Department of Defense.

In the first place, this is a competitive system-the American way of doing things. From the cradle we are taught to be competitive, as were our forefathers. Competition is the essence of our democratic system which stems from a way of life that encourages the individual to develop himself as fully as his God-given talents will allow, consistent with due respect for the rights and feelings of others. When he becomes a member of a group, be it social, athletic or business, he becomes a loyal team player. As a member of the team, he accepts and supports enthusiastically the competitive role of the team.

Few establishments in this world, perhaps none, are as intensely competitive as American industry. For this reason it has

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It always seemed strange to me to find experienced businessmen, new to the Department of Defense, horrified by evidence of rivalry between the services. It would be a very poor Army, Navy, marine corps or Air Force that was not fiercely proud of its own service, and at the same time just as proud of its ability to serve as a team player with its sister services. And this they do well and have done extremely well, as our record in war has shown. Most interservice rivalry that I have become aware of has been productive of good results in the nation's interest. I have discussed this frequently with members of the Armed Forces and have read the congressional testimony of uniformed members of the Armed Forces on this subject and they generally support this point of view.

On the other hand, one is given the impression in Washington, particularly by statements made by civilians in the Department of Defense, that interservice rivalry is out of control and extremely harmful. A corollary to this is that more would be accomplished if it were not for interservice rivalry and that only through the intercession of the higher-echelon civilians in the Department of Defense can progress be made. If this were true, then our military joint commands overseas would be ridden with interservice bickering since they lack the calming control of any civilian superiors. The contrary is the case. Whether the overseas command is headed by an admiral or a general makes no difference. They are efficient working teams and if there is any interservice feeling, it expends itself in athletic competitions and cocktail chatter, and much of the interservice competition is friendly and helpful to our nation's interest.

The question remains unanswered, Why all the talk of interservice rivalry in Washington? On analysis it seems to be a handy thing to have about on which to blame failure for proper decisions in defense matters. About a month after the turbulence and criticism following in the wake of Sputnik I, I discussed congressional attitude with a member of the Army's Legislative and Liaison group. He informed me that Congress was being told by

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members of the Department of Defense that our failure to launch a satellite first was due to interservice rivalry. This was shocking because it was entirely untrue. Subsequent discussion on The Hill, including references to harmful interservice rivalry in the President's "chins-up" talks, tended to support this. It was for this reason that I decided, in my appearances before Congress, that I would make as clear as circumstances would allow the facts on our satellite-missile failures.

There is one aspect of interservice competition that is unquestionably harmful, and it is an aspect that frequently comes to public attention, and yet there is little that the services can do about it. Essentially, it is industrial competition. Industry, through extravagant advertising claims and lobbying pressures on Congress and civilian members of the Department of Defense, can place uniformed members of the Armed' Forces in a difficult position. Industry can make extravagant claims for their products and convince Congress of the accuracy of these claims, even though they are not valid. If a service will go along with industry it means an increased budget and money to spend, sometimes on things not directly associated with the industry-supported product. It is difficult for a service to resist such pressures since by going along they can rationalize their position in terms of the over-all good that can be accomplished with more money. http://www.combatreform.org/strykerhorrors.htmThe amount of money that is spent on nation-wide advertising, by industry, for hardware that is obsolete is sizable, and the pressure that industry can place through lobbies in terms of employment, payrolls and erect upon constituents is impressive to Congress, Finally, when such forces come into play in the committee system that presently characterizes the decision-making processes of the Department of Defense, they can become very harmful.

It is at this stage that they assume the appearance of interservice differences although fundamentally the problem is an industrial and not a service one. This gets to the heart and soul of a type of competition that leads to results that are, at times, alarming.

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If we believe as we profess to believe in the superiority of our competitive system, and thus believe that American industry reflects this competition at its best, then our military services should be intimately associated with American industry. Thus, in theory, as industry through its unique competitive and free enterprise system, quantitatively and qualitatively surpassed the state-controlled industries of a totalitarian nation, a military service would benefit and should expect to be equipped with the latest and best weapons systems. In fact, on even brief analysis, it would appear that such a marriage between the Armed Forces and industry would appear to be not only advisable, but absolutely essential. Experience, however, points out real pitfalls, for industry competing for dollars will insist that its products be used long after they become obsolete. Lobbies and pressure groups will use every means conceivable to cause the Department of Defense to invest in their obsolete weapons systems, and they will insist on a continued investment in those systems, even though the best interest of the country and the service concerned is not being served. They rationalize their point of view in terms of possible unemployment that may be caused by cancellation of orders. They point out the disastrous effect that unemployment might have on the economy of the country, finally arguing that though prepared militarily: we might well lose the decision to the Soviets in the arena of economy.

It takes the judgment of Solomon and no little political fortitude to make decisions on problems such as these. Unfortunately, they are not always made in time and hundreds of millions of dollars have been and are being spent on obsolete weapons systems. At the same time, the Armed Forces are placed in a very difficult position when they realize they are being denied weapons systems, not because of a limited budget, but because industrial pressure is causing decisions to be made in favor of systems that are already obsolete. And ever-present, through all of the maze of committee meetings, industrial discussions and congressional hearings, is what appears to be intense interservice rivalry whereas

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in most cases it is fundamentally industrial rivalry.

Pertinent to this discussion, in the unclassified and published record of the hearings before the congressional committee looking into the satellite and missile programs, there is a section entitled: "Inter-service rivalries." If It consists of an exchange between a Senator and a witness and the witness's reply to a question is devoted entirely to the problems of industry and their willingness to exchange information with each other.

The rivalry among the services that I have seen has not been harmful; on the contrary, from the nation's point of view it has been helpful. The uniformed members of the Armed Services in Washington work well together and they keep the nation's interest foremost. There is far more interservice co-operation than there is competition.

D. ORGANIZATION FOR DEFENSE

"A major purpose of military organization is to achieve real unity in the defense establishment in all the principal features... of military activity. Of all these one of the most important to our nation's security is strategic planning and direction..."

--PRESIDENT EISENHOWER'S STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE, January 9, 1958

Unity of purpose is fundamental to survival. However, purpose is one thing and accomplishment is another-and the gap between may be wide indeed. The divisive forces that bear upon decision-making in the Department of Defense are many, industrial interests, political pressures, professional competence or lack of it in committees, personal prejudices, and service interests.

All work against unity of purpose. And all are, and will remain for the indefinite future, part of our planning processes. The object of a national defense organization therefore should be twofold: to restrain these divisive forces so that they do a minimum of harm to our defense readiness, and to provide the means

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19. "Inquiry into the Satellite and Missile Programs." U.S. Senate Hearings, Part I, p. 36.

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whereby the best scientific, industrial and military judgment can be brought to bear in decision-making.

No organizational arrangement, no matter how skillfully conceived, can by itself solve our defense problems. It takes people and resources to solve them. But the best of people, regardless of the resources made available to them, can be thwarted and frustrated, and finally made ineffective, by a poor organization.

The evidence of the first ten years of the operation of the office of the Department of Defense abundantly supports this. Some of the most able and most intelligent Americans in public life have sought to bring order out of the decision-making maze of the Department of Defense, only to fail. It has been the organization that has defeated them. Interminable delays, caused by committees pyramiding upon committees and unfortunately very often containing individuals not well qualified to deal with the problems under consideration, have characterized the organization of the past decade. Further, despite the desire for "clear and unchallenged civilian responsibility" [20] uniformed members of the Armed Forces have successfully sponsored the development and procurement of weapons systems of which their civilian superiors, had they been given all of the facts, undoubtedly would have disapproved.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff

Civilian control means civilian decision-making. It does not mean decisions that are made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then confirmed by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary of Defense is going to make the decisions, he needs the best possible professional military advice upon which to base them. As Walter Lippmann has expressed it,

But then we arrive at the real question. How are these great decisions to be made? It is all very well to say that they should be made by the Secretary of Defense. But Secretaries come and go. They are chosen

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23. President's Reorganization Plan, submitted to Congress on April 30, 1953.

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from lists of politically available men. They come from banking, from law, from professional politics, from the automobile business and the soap business. How does a man who has spent the first fifty years of his life far away from strategic problems go into the Pentagon, hang up his hat, sit down at the Secretary's desk, and make the decisions which he is supposed to make? [21]

The answer is given by William R. Kintner in Forging a New Sword. "At the present time the Secretary of Defense obtains his advice from an array of civilian assistant secretaries and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In our conflict with the Soviet Union, Soviet professionals are stacked up against United States amateurs at the decision-making level." [22] The answer might appear to be that the Secretary can obtain professional military advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not work like that. As long as a Chief of Staff is responsible for the leadership and morale of a service, he cannot be expected to be party to decisions in the Department of Defense that deleteriously affect his own service. In the final analysis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff corporate attitude and expressions of opinion reflect the two-against-one situation that prevails. The record of the last ten years makes this abundantly clear. During that time we have had some outstanding Chairmen, notably General Omar Bradley and General Nathan Twining. All of their wisdom, fairness and exceptional professional competence could not prevail against an organizational structure that has established us in second place in the technological race with the Soviets.

Recently I heard a distinguished member of the United States Senate describe in a few words the evils of the modus operandi of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was speaking to a senior general:

"The trouble with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General, is it just simply doesn't work. If Congress sends you five billion dollars, you decide to buy five more supercarriers and five more B-52 wings."

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21. New York Herald Tribune, May 8, 1958.

22. Forging a New Sword, William R. Kintner.

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I intervened and said, "Nothing for the Army?" And the Senator replied, "Yes, that is right. Nothing for the Army." Which tells the story tersely and well. Of course it could possibly be the Army and Navy against the Air Force or the Air Force and Army against the Navy. However, the Chairman, in the event of a sharp difference of opinion, may act as a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in presenting the problem to the Secretary of Defense. Regardless of the law, or of the intent of Congress, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under its present organization has tremendous influence on the development of our future weapons systems. He can wield far more power than any chief of a general staff could possibly have. As an illustration, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford, was a proponent of supercarriers. The position that he took in the B-36 hearings in which he bitterly opposed the growth of SAC at the expense of the supercarrier program is well known. During his tenure of office as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the supercarrier program received unprecedented support. And, as Representative Cannon observed in February of 1958, "We are ahead of the Russians in supercarriers, tomahawks and scalping knives. No one questions our pre-eminence in any of these three categories."[23] The workings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must be positively bewildering to a military student. For example, in the fall of 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff published a document in which it was unanimously agreed that, among other things, there would be no range limitation placed upon the surface-to-surface missiles employed by the Army in a tactical role. This paper had been under discussion for over a year, it was well thought out and all services agreed to its publication. This was sound and exactly the type of guidance the Army needed, for the Soviets were then intensifying their missile development program. As our Armies overseas experimented with tactical nuclear warfare formations, they began to realize that they would need missiles of great range. At the

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23. Congressional Record-House, Vol. 104.

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same time, all intelligence indications pointed to the Soviet Army developing long-range missiles also. As a matter of urgency, therefore, the Army cut back its other research and development programs in order to support an intensified surface-to-surface missile program. It had had approval for a missile of approximately five-hundred-miles range since 1951. It seemed clearly in the nation's interest that it accelerate its missile programs and it was obviously a tactical necessity for the Army to have missiles of many hundreds of miles range as quickly as it could develop them. In 1956, the Chairman opposed the Army's development of the missiles it so badly needed. Despite the pleas of the Chief of Staff of the Army, the other chiefs and the Chairman decided that the Army didn't need a missile of greater range than two hundred miles. At the time, and it was the time of Suez, the Soviet Army had operational missiles of 750-mile range.

Thus the Joint Chiefs of Staff reversed its position on such a fundamental problem and this in the face of demonstrable need. The economic factors alone are compelling. The estimated cost of an operational ICBM is about $17.5 million, lln IRBM $6.4 million, and a mid-range missile of the type under consideration, one-half million dollars. A mid-range missile is invaluable in limited-war-type operation because of its high mobility and quick responsiveness to tactical requirements. Finally, at the time the decision was made to deny its development, no other service expressed an interest in filling this vacuum into which the Soviets were moving very rapidly.

The problem illustrates one of the fundamental shortcomings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff system. The Chiefs must wear two hats, one as a member of the JCS and another as a member of their own service. In a larger sense, they should keep the national interest paramount. But one cannot disassociate the two.

And, in fact, the record will show that interest in the particular service usually prevails, although entirely in a patriotic sense, since their background, loyalties and responsibilities all suggest that in this manner the national interest is best served. It is obvious, therefore, that the responsibilities must be separated. One solution that should work quite well would be to appoint the Chiefs of Staff to a Senior Military Advisory Group upon the termination of their tour of duty with the service. In the latter group they would act as an advisory group to the Secretary of Defense and fill a role comparable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Thus their military background and valuable counsel could be brought to bear on our national defense problems without their having to serve an obligation of leadership to their own particular branches of service. With the separation of the "Joint Chiefs" from the joint staff that had been created to serve them, the joint staff, numbering over two hundred officers of all services, could be made available to serve the Secretary of Defense. It would then, in effect, become the military staff of the Department of Defense, serving subordinate to the Secretary and Assistant Secretaries of Defense.

A Military Staff

Considerable opposition to a military staff for the Secretary of Defense exists today. There is frequent reference to the horrors of a "Prussian General Staff." I am not sure that many people who use that expression know what they mean by it, but they use it so frequently that it has come to assume some meaning. For example, in a talk at the National Press Club on April 10, 1958, in discussing the proposed Department of Defense reorganization, Secretary of Defense McElroy took care to point out that, 'It does not set up a Prussian-German type general staff." That assurance contains all of the bad words: "Prussian," "German," and "general staff." Members of Congress seem to share the Secretary's abhorrence for them.

Appearing before Mr. Vinson's committee in the spring of 1958, I was asked a question by a member of the committee that contained the implication that we surely did not want the kind of staff that Germany had when she lost the war. I pointed out that Hitler did not have a general staff. This seemed to fluster him for

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a moment; however, he quickly recovered. His attitude is shared by many. Nevertheless, the fact is that in the last two world wars Germany did not have a German general staff. In World War I, the German Army and Navy were completely independent and no staff existed to co-ordinate their efforts. In World War II, the failure of Germany to achieve a quick victory has been attributed to its failure to co-ordinate its Army and Navy efforts.[24] At the beginning of World War II, Hitler exercised control over three entirely independent and un-co-ordinated military services-Army (Reichswehr), Navy (Reichsmarine) and Air Force (Luftwaffe) -through a small personal staff. This staff, entitled the Armed Forces Supreme Command (Oberkommando Der Wehrmacht), was generally known as OKW. The OKW never actually in any way operated as a unified general staff for the co-ordination of the three services. Although composed of Army, Navy and Air Force officers, the individuals on this small personal staff of the German dictator were picked not for their military knowledge, but because of their loyalty to Hitler and to the Nazi party.

The historical evidence is clear that there was in Germany no pretense toward unified staff control of the three armed services during either World War l or World War II. Whatever co-ordination of effort was accomplished among the services was due to the initiative of individual German officers. One of the most telling indictments of this lack of co-ordination through some kind of unified central control has been made by General Bobo Zimmermann of the German Army:

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24. Der Seekrieg: The German Navy's Story, 1939-1945, Friedrich Ruge.

U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings 1957, pp. 22-24.

25. The Fatal Decisions, Seymour Freidin and William Richardson, eds.

Sloane, 1956, p. 238.

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Memoirs of German military leaders of World War II are replete with complaints of lack of co-ordination of military efforts.

The fact that there was inadequate understanding of sea power evidenced in top-level German military decisions can in no way be used as an indictment of centralized military control. Quite the contrary, such evidence of lack of proper evaluation of all military considerations is clear proof that this, like other failures in military co-ordination, was due to the lack of a single German staff where all aspects of all military problems could have been considered in a logical, thorough manner.

The German Army, of course, had a staff that could be compared with the U.S. Army staff. As in the case of the United States, however, this staff was an Army staff only and in neither World War I nor World War II did it have any responsibility for over-all interservice co-ordination. There is no basis in history, nor in logic, for an assumption that a military staff composed of American citizens wearing the uniforms of the different services, would have more sinister objectives, or be less responsive to civilian control, than has been the Army's General Staff for more than fifty years.

In summary, Germany did not lose both wars because of a well-organized efficient staff system, for that is what a general staff is and that is what we had. She lost it, among other reasons, because she lacked this very thing. On the other hand, the staff system developed in the United States is far more efficient than anything created by any nation, to my knowledge, in military history. It has managed military affairs and brought victory to our arms in the far corners of the earth. Sir Winston Churchill, in referring to the American staff system in World War II, has said:

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26. The Hinge of Fate, Sir Winston Churchill, p. 387.

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Good staff organization exists now under Admiral Stump in the Pacific and General Norstad in Europe. A good staff can bring competent professional advice to a commander and serve him and the nation's interest well. There is no comparable staff in the Department of Defense today.

Technical Trends and Changes in the Services

Before considering an over-all organizational concept to meet our future military needs it would be well to examine the tools that will become available to us. Let us make an estimate of the form that our separate services may take by 1965. Certainly change, perhaps drastic change, is inevitable, if the present technical trends continue.

Nuclear weapons will become conventional firepower. This will be true in the armed forces of NATO, including the United States, and of the USSR and the satellites. They are conventional now, of course, in forces such as SAC and the Soviet Long Range Bomber Forces. To say that they will become conventional means that they will be in the hands of all military organizations including, for example, the smallest infantry units.

The United States and the USSR will have in their stockpiles an abundance of large-yield thermonuclear weapons. More significant than these, however, will be the stockpiles of small, precise-yield weapons suitable for tactical employment. Their number, size and performance will be critical to the outcome of any future limited wars.

Nuclear weapons will become conventional for several reasons, among them cost, effectiveness against enemy weapons, and ease of handling. By 1965 the cost of nuclear weapons will be far less than present high-explosive weapons of equivalent yield and effectiveness. Many millions of dollars spent in the manufacture, shipping, storage and handling of high-explosive projectiles and bombs will be saved through the use of nuclear weapons moved by air to combat areas. This is not to say that all high-explosive ammunition will be replaced by nuclear ammunition-far from it. Many of the smaller tactical targets will require high-explosive

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ammunition, but the large artillery concentrations, for example, will be replaced by atomic weapons.

An immediate consequence of the employment of nuclear weapons will be widely dispersed targets on both sides in any tactical engagement. Hence, weapons of far greater range of effectiveness will be required to gain tactical success. Nuclear weapons will meet this need.

From a technical point of view, only a nuclear weapon will provide defense against an incoming nuclear warhead, whether from a manned aircraft, missile or satellite. The object in such a defense must be to completely destroy the incoming weapon and carrier. This a nuclear weapon can do. And finally, while the problem is rather complex in a technical sense, the handling of nuclear weapons is far simpler than the handling of the many million rounds of high-explosive ammunition required in past wars.

Gavin's M113 of the Sky Cavalry

Tactical nuclear weapons will be used by individuals in defense against, for example, tank concentrations. In this they may be shoulder-fired. They will be fired from track-laying vehicles and from aerial jeeps of the type used in Sky Cavalry organizations. In air combat they will be used in air-to-surface missiles and in air-to-air missiles. By 1965 it will be possible to place nuclear weapons aboard satellites for either offensive or defensive use.

Finally, nuclear weapons will be used in submarine warfare. In the latter role, they will be used in air-launched missiles against enemy submarines as well as in submarine-launched missiles, and in land-to-sea anti-submarine missiles.

Complementing this evolution in firepower will be an evolution in mobility. By 1965 the use of missiles and huge jet transports should have a decisive bearing upon all tactical operations. By that time, jet transports should be operational in large numbers on a global scale and missile mobility for high-priority cargo should be in development. Global air movements for highly specialized military forces will be normal. All missiles and fissionable material used in overseas areas will be flown. The air transportation of missile and fissionable material is not only tac-

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tically desirable but administratively essential. This is because missiles, even as late as 1965, will be highly sensitive to obsolescence. It will not be practicable to supply missiles as we have manned aircraft and trucks in the past, as items that could be

placed in long lines of supply. Technology will be so dynamic that constant changes and modifications will have to be made, and missiles may not spend several months in a long supply line. Furthermore, there will no doubt be an insufficiency of some types of missiles for the indefinite future. This is also true of their nuclear warheads. Hence we should no longer think in terms of huge stockpiles of nuclear ammunition scattered throughout the world much as we thought of piles of cannon balls in the Civil War and acres of 105mm ammunition and bombs in World War II. There will not be sufficient nuclear ammunition or missiles to allow such waste in storage. Both the nuclear warhead and missile will be too sensitive to deterioration to allow prolonged storage.

To meet the Western world's requirements in the missile-nuclear age, therefore, it is absolutely essential that both of these be moved by air at all times. This suggests the need for a number of special types of aircraft suited to this particular purpose. Far less exotic than jet transports, but perhaps more important to winning tactical battles will be the small air vehicles of the land forces, both Army and marine Corps. Tilt wings, tilt engines, ducted fans, deflected jets, and a number of other developments now make it quite clear that air mobility will give select portions of our land forces a tremendous advantage over an opponent, provided this is understood and properly exploited.

Comparable changes will take place in sea mobility. An outstanding American authority on submarines, Vice-Admiral C. B. Monsen, in a recent issue of Look [magazine], wrote:

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27. Look, May 13, 1958.

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Naval combat vessels, and all the combat elements accompanying them-supplies, cargo, missiles and fighting units of the marine corps-will have far greater mobility than they have had in the past. Improvements in firepower and mobility would be of little combat value if we were not able to make comparable improvements in our means for controlling them. Earlier warning times, more accurate target data at far greater distances, and a minimum of reaction time must be realized. These appear to be attainable.

Through drones, eyes can be provided for our combat missile units. The most interesting reconnaissance vehicle, and perhaps the most promising, is the satellite. Combat formations of all services will be equipped with combat surveillance units containing a variety of useful drones that will be absolutely essential to missile-space age combat. Such drones should be adapted to submarine warfare as well as land warfare. Thus, they could conduct a reconnaissance of possible missile sites and other types of tactical targets for missile-launching submarines. But mere observation by drones will be far from sufficient to our combat needs. A highly responsive system of handling the data they obtain is required. Reaction times will be so short that computers will be needed to determine target locations and time of firing, and to transmit launching and firing signals to weapons. This will be particularly necessary in defense against missiles in which the problems of analysis, evaluation and determination of when to fire are far beyond man's ability to solve in the few minutes or seconds available to him. All the communication devices touched upon so far in their simplest forms will tell us where a target will be, where our own weapon is, and in some cases provide a solution to the equation-that is, tell the weapon when to fire.

Nuclear warfare will introduce an additional problem. If surface-burst weapons are used, serious fallout may occur. Practically all tactical weapons now under consideration are intended for air bursts, both for reasons of increased effectiveness and self-

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defense from fallout. However, some surface bursts will take place either through accident or intent. Thus in a tactical nuclear battle it will be necessary for a tactical commander to have available accurate and timely information, in readily understandable form, of fallout patterns. By 1965 accurate fallout data, properly presented, should be available to tactical commanders as well as to those responsible for home defense. Closely related to fallout prediction is weather data. By 1965 the control of weather, even to a limited degree, may have a significant bearing upon combat operations. Hence, accurate weather data must be available to those responsible for combat decisions, since it may become a tactical weapon.

Military establishments have never over anticipated technical trends and the impact of these trends upon future military organizations. Quite the contrary; the normal pattern has been to underestimate changes that may take place. There are a number of reasons for this. By their very nature, military organizations must be conservative. They must prepare to win a war today with the resources at hand. Even when given more resources than may be required to win in battle, they are inclined, as insurance against defeat, to over-invest in contemporary weapons. Wars are usually infrequent and the thinking of the younger generation of officers is critically contaminated by the veterans of past wars. Thus they frequently find themselves preparing feverishly to fight the last war better.

These conditions could be tolerated in the past since the time between the opening of hostilities and the final decision was sufficient to enable a nation to revamp its military establishment and its thinking to produce new weapons to match new concepts.

Technology, too, was slow to change. The undulating pattern from offense to defense that has characterized warfare through all history shows a span of several hundred years between peaks of offensive power, until this century. Now these peaks are but a few years apart. Hundreds of years elapsed between the time gunpowder was first used in Europe until its use in machine 269 weapons in the battles of attrition in World War I. But a fraction of that time elapsed between the discovery and development of the gasoline-petroleum engine and the fast-moving blitzkrieg that brought the Free World to the brink of defeat in 1940. Now, the time of change is but a fraction of that fraction. Nevertheless, it is the time, brief as it may be, in which an understanding of missiles and their associated nuclear firepower mobility may bring defeat or survival to a free people. The changes that must take place in our military organizations to adapt to this violent evolution are many. And they must be made. However, we must not allow ourselves to become so mesmerized by the wonders of tomorrow's technology that we spend most of our time, effort and resources endeavoring to adapt our military establishment to it.

Instead we must have the imagination and vision to foresee the military requirements essential to our self-defense in the future and then make demands upon technology to meet them. I think that it is important that we understand this precedence.

Let us now examine some of the significant changes in the services themselves. These are the tools with which the tactical battles of tomorrow will be won.

The basic combat tool of the Army is the fighting division. It is the smallest unit that combines administration with all of the fighting elements and' thus it can, in theory, fight an independent action. As conceived, it contains all of the supply services necessary for the support of its fighting elements for at least several days. In its original form, its structure was based upon horse mobility. In the memory of many still in the Army, wagons carried rations, ammunition and baggage for an infantry regiment and these were backed by the long wagon trains of the infantry division. Generally, the automotive engine changed the internal structure from a quadrilateral to triangular division but did not change the fact that it was a self-contained administrative unit. As a consequence during World War II and Korea the division was burdened with truck trains and vast tonnages of supplies. Until the advent of tactical nuclear weapons, this could be

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tolerated. In the nuclear age the division cannot continue in its present form as an administrative unit. Supplies will have to be moved far to the rear, out of division responsibility. The combat units within the division must be reorganized to enable the division to survive under the impact of nuclear weapons and react to win in tactical nuclear combat. A trend to accomplish this has been apparent for some years and it has manifested itself in the creation of battle groups and combat commands in place of, generally speaking, reinforced battalions and reinforced regiments. This trend will continue. The "division" designation, should be retained. The next higher organization, however, should combine administration with fighting units. It should be designated as a Battle Command. This would eliminate the old corps. The next higher command above the Battle Command would be the Field Army.

The Army has recently adopted the Pentomic division, which reduced the strength of the division from roughly seventeen thousand to thirteen thousand men. However, the Pentomic division is seriously lacking in missile firepower and adequate reconnaissance, both Sky Cavalry and drones. These should be added to it and more of its administrative personnel moved far to the rear.

All divisions in the Army except those for highly specialized tasks, such as mountain and jungle warfare, and the Sky Cavalry division for reconnaissance, screening and exploitation, should be armored divisions. Armor protection should be provided for all fighting personnel engaged in sustained combat. They will then be able to operate in a nuclear environment with much greater effectiveness than in the present type divisions.

The airborne division is an outgrowth of the combat need for a hyper-mobile force in World War II, and the available commercial air transport to provide that mobility. Although its fighting effectiveness has been of a high order, on analysis, its functional performance has left much to be desired: Now, with surface-to-air missiles available in abundance in the hands of an enemy, the airborne division can no longer carry out the type of airborne

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operations of WorId War II and Korea. As rapidly as the Army can do so, it must convert the airborne divisions into Sky Cavalry divisions. The parachute capability should be retained. It will allow for combat and administrative flexibility. With this capability airborne divisions may be delivered in the combat zone without the need for landing on long airstrips.

The Army has recently created missile support commands. This trend should be continued and by 1965 missile divisions should be in being. A missile division would contain its own target surveillance drones, armored or Sky Cavalry for ground protection, surface-to-air missiles for air defense, as well as its own surface-to-surface missiles. This concept would envision a grouping for tactical purposes of highly mobile long-range missiles fired from hundreds of miles behind our own forces. They should be readily capable of intercontinental air movement in a reinforcing role. They should be used in defense of land areas against submarine-missile attack in close co-operation with our own naval forces.

Surface-to-air nuclear weapons should be available in sufficient quantity to provide the degree of independence of operations on land that our Army and marine units require. This is now possible against an enemy equipped with manned aircraft. It will be far more difficult against an enemy equipped with surface-to-surface missiles. Antimissile-missile systems will be required to deal with the long-range ICBM, particularly within the United States, as well as missiles to deal with shorter-range missiles to be used against our forces deployed in vital overseas areas. By 1965, both types of missiles should be in being, although they will still be in need of considerable improvement. The threat to land operations from space will be quite serious by 1965. Up to that time passive measures probably will be adequate. By then, however, as man's capability to fight in space improves, the problem of defense against attacks and reconnaissance from space will become impressive and challenging. A satellite to intercept a satellite should be available.

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The present trend in the Navy of shifting from surface vessels to submarines will be continued. By 1965, we should have a growing submarine-missile capability. The carrier and surface vessels that we have should be completely equipped with missiles, drones and assault landing air vehicles. Their value, however, will decrease rapidly with the increase in the numbers of Soviet missile-carrying submarines. One of the most interesting organizational problems is that of the United States Marine Corps. At present it appears to be showing schizophrenic tendencies, not knowing whether to become an all-out Sky Cavalry type of organization or whether to retain heavy sustained combat equipment. I believe that by 1965 the Sky Cavalry trend will have given the marine corps a very effective capability to extend naval operations on land in keeping with their role and their best fighting traditions.

By 1965, major fighting units of the marine corps should be movable by submersible vessels. In proximity to their objective areas, they will have the capability of surfacing and launching an attack by air. A sizable portion of the marine corps will continue to operate out of surface craft in their traditional amphibious role, especially in limited types of actions. By 1965, however, the trend toward submersible craft will become dominant.

The Air Force faces some challenging and fascinating problems in this decade. Its long-range striking force will be equipped with an ICBM fired from fixed installations. By 1965, however, it will be apparent that adequate ranges can be obtained from missiles of much smaller size. By that date they will be converting to mobile ICBMs, or planning such conversions. For example, with the extensive railroad network that we have in the Rocky Mountain areas and the labyrinth of tunnels and deep canyons through that area, we should be able to develop a highly effective, comparatively invulnerable ICBM system for firing off railroad cars.

Moving from concealed tunnels to firing sites, they should be able to fire with a minimum likelihood of detection. Warheads and fuel can be pre-stockpiled in the most likely firing areas and the system can be fully mobile. The shorter-range missiles, the IRBM,

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should be entirely mobile to be combat-worthy.

All missiles deployed overseas should be supported by an air supply system exactly as in past wars we have supported our combat forces by an adequate naval supply system. This implies need for several highly specialized types of aircraft-for example, aircraft capable of servicing missiles and nuclear warheads en route to operational areas; aircraft of such size, configuration and floor strength as to enable us to move "fire brigades" rapidly to any point overseas; aircraft especially equipped for medical evacuation and to some extent surgical care en route; and aircraft adapted to the many combat needs that will still remain, such as air-to-surface missile launchers as well as early-warning aircraft. It would appear that many of the functions suggested by the types of air vehicles should be grouped into operational type units. This tendency exists today and by 1965 we should have missile support wings, combat support wings as part of our long-range and short-range striking forces, and medical evacuation wings.

By 1965, the Air Force will have placed men in orbit and it will be acquiring a capability of conducting combat operations in space. A manned space station should be in orbit and plans should be under way for interplanetary exploration.

It should be quite evident from the foregoing that while each of the services continues to specialize in the type of combat that can be won in its own medium, the capabilities of all services will overlap. Their organization within a theater of operations, therefore, should be completely integrated. Let us look briefly at several of the possible theaters of operations.

In describing the military characteristics of the major geographic areas of the earth as they would appear during combat in the mid-sixties, I intend merely to suggest concepts. No plans exist to organize areas in the manner suggested nor does the intent, to my knowledge, exist today. I realize that a malicious person could see in these ideas a basis for charges of aggressive intent, but I can assure him that this is not the case. Actually, if

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the Free World is to survive, it must anticipate the events of tomorrow and give some thought to what might happen if it must fight for its survival. It must consider the earth as a tactical whole and its segments as theaters of operations. And having done so, it must at least give thought to what measures must be taken in the interest of self-preservation. If doing this makes one vulnerable to the charge of aggressive intent, then this is a risk that elementary self-interest demands that we take.

Europe-Africa

Europe and Africa are part of one tactical theater. Africa, in fact, is the key to the defense of Europe.

Referring to map 1, we can see that the European-African area divides itself into two parts : Western Europe consisting of a little over one million square miles of densely populated land, and Africa consisting of eleven and one half million square miles containing in its entirety less population than the European peninsula. Two major waterways cross the area: in the north the English Channel, no longer a barrier to military aggression, and farther south the Mediterranean Sea, a formidable obstacle to land movement, but readily crossed by missiles and aircraft.

To the east is the land bridge connecting Europe, Asia and Africa.

This fact alone, that it is a land bridge, highlights the importance of this area. The Northern European area consists of rolling flat country containing an extensive network of east-west roads and railroads. Numerous major waterways How south to north, all of them easily crossed by modern amphibious equipment. To the south, the mountain masses of the Vosges, the Alps and the Pyrenees dominate the area. Farther south, in Africa, the Atlas Mountains dominate the western and north African area. Then come the vast stretches of desert, and below them the tropical rain forest and savannas of Mid-Africa.

The measures taken to defend the European-African area in the 1965 period will be determined by available resources and the geographic nature of the area itself. Obviously the shallow depth

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of the northern area suggests that only weapons that will insure its defense should be placed there. Retaliatory weapons would be in danger of immediate destruction and should be placed farther south where there is adequate concealment and land depth.

The basic requirements for the defense of Western Europe are, in order of priority: first, the best surface-to-air missile defense obtainable; next, the best surface-to-surface missile defense matched with highly mobile, nuclear equipped land forces. Because of its vulnerability, none of the area of Northern Europe should. be considered suitable for a base for counteroffensive operations. The effectiveness of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface nuclear weapons in the 1965 period, however, should be so great that a defense of this area would be entirely feasible.

If the forces in the NATO area are sufficient in strength and properly equipped with nuclear missiles in all the necessary categories, the Soviets would pay a very high price, and even then fail, if they sought direct aggression into the NATO area. Italy, Spain and the islands in the Mediterranean and the African land mass offer the best location for retaliatory missile forces. These missiles should be highly mobile, both in the air and on land.

Missile units should be deployed in considerable depth and moved forward by air under cover of darkness to provide the close supporting missile fires that will be needed in the event of aggression. There is no military need for long-range missiles being placed in UK. Missiles from Kenya, the Middle East and Southern Europe can accomplish as much in defense as missiles fired from UK. At the same time, they will be far less vulnerable to being destroyed by Soviet missile counterfirings.

Present Army and Air Force units are inadequate for NATO's defense. General Norstad has recently asked for an increase to thirty Army divisions. This would be a minimum and would be adequate only if surface-to-air and long-range surface-to-surface missiles are also provided. In addition, there should be, by 1965, submarine-launched missile support. This is particularly important

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in the northern area where adequate land is not available to provide defense in depth.

Finally, in addition to the NATO requirements for forces committed to the immediate defense of Western Europe, there should be provided a local "fire brigade." This should be in the nature of a reserve and geographically placed so as to be available for air movement to any area in difficulty. A composite Battle Command consisting of at least one Sky Cavalry division and two armored divisions, supported by several missile support commands would be adequate. Their general location should be in Western and Northern Africa with the divisions in the north and the missile units as far south as Liberia, for example. It should be evident from the foregoing, that the center of gravity of the effort of defending the European-African area has shifted far to the south. And while this very brief discussion has concentrated itself primarily with military forces, the political and economic implications of such a strategic concept are quite obvious and compelling. Technical and economic assistance must be provided the people of North Africa. The people of Africa must be given every opportunity to improve their living standards and they must become active in the community of Western nations. By 1965, it will become obvious, if it is not already so, that Africa is the key to the defense of Western Europe, and the Middle East with its great land bridge and economic resources is the key to Africa.

Asia

Let us now look to the Far East (see map 2). Here again we have a geographic situation in which the northern area of the Free Nations is shallow in depth, whereas the south is extensive.

This, and a consideration of the prevailing west-to-east winds, places the offshore islands of the Asian land mass, Japan, Okinawa and Taiwan, in a hazardous atomic situation. By 1965, they will be "in the front lines" in every sense of that expression. They

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will be under immediate threat of Soviet and Chinese missile attack. Missiles used against the mainland in retaliation, if surface nuclear detonations occur, will create serious fallout conditions.

This is true also of South Korea. It is important, therefore, that any tactical concepts developed to defend the Free WorId area in Asia be based upon: (a) maximum use of non-atomic force in South Korea and Japan, (b) surface-to-air nuclear missiles to provide an air defense, and (c) submarine-missile-Iaunched support forces.

The southern portion of the area is highlighted by the Indo-China Peninsula that extends into the Malaya Peninsula, and then south to Singapore. Farther to the east is the Philippine Archipelago, and to the south Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, backed up by the Philippines, constitute the frontier of freedom in Southeast Asia.

In a sense, the Philippines is the cornerstone of the area, physically and politically. Its dispersed islands, numbering over a thousand, provide numerous well-protected launching areas for retaliatory missiles in the event of aggression. In this area should also be located a local "fire brigade," a geographic reserve to back up the SEATO [28] area, SEATO is the key to the defense of the Asia-Pacific area. It should be anticipated that the Communists will make every effort to penetrate the area, through Indonesia and through member countries.

In the mid-thirties I served with the Philippine Scouts for two years. In late 1954 I went back for a brief visit. On the same trip I visited Vietnam and Thailand. I talked to Presidents Magsaysay in the Philippines and Diem in Vietnam about their mutual defense problems. They agreed emphatically on one point: if the

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28. The Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) was signed in Manila on September 8, 1954. In it members agree, among other things, to maintain by self-help, and mutual aid, their capacity to resist armed attack; to meet armed attack in the treaty area in accordance with each party's constitutional processes. A council to carry out this treaty has been established. Members of the treaty are: United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand.

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Communists were to establish themselves in the area it would be by way of the "rice paddies" and not by direct military force.

These countries need our continuing economic and technical help. I believe that we have done wonders in the Philippines in the last fifty years. They stand as a monument to our generosity and dedication to the ideals of freedom. But much remains to be done, particularly in the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia-Thailand area.

The two major areas of the planet just described contain, in effect, our Short Range Striking Forces. They are in immediate contact and would be engaged at once in the event of aggression.

They should be adequate in strength to provide a defense of those areas for a prolonged period of time without reinforcement. It should be evident to an aggressor that they may not be taken over by military force without bringing upon himself unacceptable damage. The forces in being, and the geographically placed "fire brigades," should be able to deal effectively and rapidly with limited aggression in any form. Both of these areas should be backed by Long Range Striking Forces bases in the North American area. Let us look at that area.

Viewed from the USSR (see map 3), the shortest route to North America and the United States is over the North Pole.

Thus the Arctic area is of extraordinary significance. It has been considered impassable for military forces, except for aircraft and missiles, and like other once impassable areas, it may contain the key to our future survival. This is not to say that an army will cross the North Pole, but weapons with all of the power of an army certainly will. And furthermore an ability to operate in the Arctic-and in this area I would include Greenland-may be the key to the defense of the United States.

For example, the most critical factor in the defense against manned bomber attack and missile attack is time-time in which to react with defensive missiles. Reaction time depends upon the amount of warning one receives, and the amount of warning depends in general upon how far forward our observation may be.

Theoretically, it is possible to be far enough forward in the North

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Pole area to observe Soviet missiles while the engines are still burning in sustained thrust. From radar facilities in Greenland, one may track missiles long before the radar facilities in Canada can, and of course, long before those in the United States. At present we have an extensive line of radars across Northern Canada and Alaska. These were to protect the United States against manned bomber attack. Now we will require larger and more powerful radars, although fewer in number because of their increased range, to give us early warning of Soviet missiles.

Their value to us is directly related to how far forward they are placed. Obviously such radars will be vulnerable to missile attack and raids by surface forces. They will therefore need protection. The ideal pattern of Soviet attack would be to destroy the early warning radars, our eyes for defense, just prior to launching missiles. It is important, therefore, that we not only provide radars of adequate performance characteristics, but that we provide protection for them.

For a number of years Soviets 'have been living on ice islands in the Arctic regions. At the present time, three such islands are in operation. Recently one Soviet island was within two hundred miles of Canadian territory. Such an island, presumably conducting scientific studies, usually contains an airstrip, several aircraft and on the average one-half dozen helicopters. If we are to gain the scientific knowledge of the Arctic regions that we should have, we must embark upon a national polar research program as a matter of high priority. Next, we should be prepared to provide forces to protect our facilities in the Arctic regions.

Briefly, this would involve all services: the Air Force operating the DEW line, the Army the missile defense and Sky Cavalry type forces, and the Navy operating submarines. The entire undertaking should be integrated into a unified effort.

The defense of the United States, and the North American area, breaks down into several categories. (See opposite page.) A Home Defense Force should be established to co-ordinate the

planning and operational activities of all the above categories.

At the present time, the headquarters of the Air Defense Force is located at Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is a well-organized and effective organization. Its area is subdivided into a number of smaller areas. Information from the distant early warning is filtered through SAGE [29] and Missile Master Centers for transmission to the combat units that actually provide the defense.

The Continental Air Defense Command is confronted with a tremendously difficult and challenging task. Originally organized to provide a defense against manned bombers, it now must be reorganized into a command adequate in its capabilities to the challenges of the missile-space age. Part of its reorganization is under way and its first surface-to-air nuclear missile, the Nike Hercules, is going on site. But to be up to the task it will face by 1965, it must fulfill procurement, equipment, personnel and training requirements without precedent, in my opinion, in our history.

Present responsibility for the defense of the United States against land attack is in the Continental Army Command located at Fort Monroe, Virginia. An operational echelon of this headquarters should be placed in the South and Middle West so that in the event of hostilities it would be free from immediate interference and thus able to do its job effectively.

The defense of the United States against submarine-launched missiles presents a most interesting technical problem. Our own Navy will do much to keep Soviet submarines at some distance from our shores. Unfortunately, it must be assumed that a number of them will be able to cruise within missile-launching ranges of both our coastal and inland areas. To deal with this threat a network of sonar pickets should be established as far from our shores as may be technically feasible, so as to give us warning of the approach of enemy submarines. These sonar pickets should be closely integrated with our air defense and with our coastal

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29. SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) is a computing system designed to track an approaching enemy plane, figure out the most efficient way of shooting it down, and guide the defensive weapon to the kill.

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missile defenses. Our missile defenses should consist of surface-to-air missiles, such as the Nike Zeus and Plato, to destroy enemy missiles in flight and surface-to-surface [IRBMs] missiles, such as the Jupiter, Thor and Pershing, to destroy hostile submarines threatening our shores. Due to the range of our surface-to-surface missiles, it will not be necessary to man many missile-launching areas to obtain extensive coverage of the ocean areas. Such missiles, however, must be mobile.

The Department of Defense does not have direct responsibility for Civil Defense. The services should be prepared, however, to participate in that defense insofar as it may be necessary to assist in recovery following an attack on the United States. At the same time, we should keep free our Reserves and National Guard for deployment outside of the continental limits of the United States if this becomes necessary. Some states have organized "Home Guard" units consisting of older men with military background.

Since disaster will not recognize state boundaries, a national agency should be prepared to assist in equipping. and. training such Home Guard units. The Department of Defense should support such a program in peacetime and be prepared in the event of emergency to back up the civilian-operated Civil Defense agencies. If directed by the President, it should be prepared to take over full responsibility. The proposed Civil Defense office, therefore, should be one of liaison. In the event the full responsibility were given to the Department of Defense, it would be appropriate to place this under the Continental Army Command, the headquarters responsible for the land defense within the Home Defense Force.

So far, I have described the three main tactical theaters, grouping the forces into functional categories, as Short Range Forces and Home Defense Forces. There is a third category, our Long Range Striking Force.

The Long Range Striking Force based within the United States consists of the Strategic Air Command, the Strategic Army Command and such Naval and Marine Forces as are available. They

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should be integrated into a unified whole. They should be highly mobile and prepared for immediate deployment overseas, preferably by air. In order to achieve this mobility, stockpiles of ammunition, supplies and heavy equipment should be established in key overseas areas, generally in the vicinity of the geographic reserves. By stockpiling in this manner, we can achieve maximum mobility with our Long Range Striking Force. Today this has been realized to a large extent in the Strategic Air Command. As manned bombers become replaced by missiles, the Strategic Air Command will depend to an increased extent upon firing its missiles from the United States. As the shift in the character of our air power continues, to an increased extent the Army and marine corps units of the Long Range Striking Force should move by air transportation. Once they have this capability, they should exercise it regularly. As we have flown bomber wings overseas on a regular training schedule in the past, as part of a global deployment plan, we should by 1965 be prepared to fly Army and marine missile and ground combat units overseas with some frequency. In 1955, the Army and the Air Force carried out an exercise of this type. During the period July 12, 1955, to July 17, 1955, the Air Force flew the Army's 187^th Airborne Infantry from Japan to North Carolina. The total lift consisted of 2,875 troops with their weapons, individual equipment and baggage. This is the type of tactical movement that we should conduct more often. To an increasing extent, as we enter the sixties, we must develop a capability of moving Army and marine units equipped with an abundance of nuclear missile firepower into the areas most likely to be threatened.

Manned space vehicles will be in orbit by 1965. Equipment development and personnel training are under way now. It is past time therefore that we gave thought to an organization to conduct space exploration. We must not wait until science gives us the hardware to decide what is to be done. A command must be organized now to study the problems of space flight and the strategy and tactics of space combat. If this is done, then we

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may be assured that the demands made upon science will meet our actual needs. The proposed organization breaks down into:

Plans and Strategy, Development, and Training. It should be noted that proposed functions of this command go beyond the present Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense, which concerns itself primarily with research. The Space Command should be a unified command, with all services participating, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense.

Recognizing that the effectiveness of weapons and their associated electronics systems, and of mobility, will reduce the earth to a tactical theater by 1965, the contributions of the Armed Forces to commands have been regrouped on a functional basis. Thus, integrated into unified teams, they will be capable of responding to any threat at once. This does not, in any way, diminish the present roles of the services as separate entities.

Each service will maintain its present establishments as such, Army, Navy (including the marine corps) and Air Force. They will merely provide individuals and units to the unified functional commands when ordered to do so by the Department of Defense.

Finally, it is important that we not create large headquarters establishments over the proposed functional groupings. Except for the Space Command, which must be created, the present headquarters are adequate to our needs. The important thing is the recognition of the need for functional groupings now, and giving this expression in the composition of the military staff that works for the Secretary of Defense.

Having examined the tactical tools, and the manner in which they are teamed to report directly to the Secretary of Defense, I believe it is obvious that the Secretary must have a competent military staff. He must have a staff that reports directly to him.

It should be composed of officers of all services picked for their professional knowledge as well as their ability to work with the other services. After duty with the Secretary of Defense, the senior among them would very likely go on to higher command

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and rarely return to their own service. It would be best to have the staff directly under the Secretary and his Assistant Secretaries.

However, even if its operational and administrative functions were separated, as they are in the Department of the Navy, it would be far better than the present DOD-JCS arrangement.

The figure below illustrates the over-all organization proposed, both for the staff and for the commands. It should be noted that

the Joint Chiefs of Staff become the Senior Military Advisory Group. The Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations become eligible for appointment to this group after completing their final tour of duty with their own service.

So far this discussion on the organization of our Armed Forces has dealt with just those-the Armed Forces of the United States and the Department of Defense. Actually, any military operations in the future should be conducted under the auspices of the United Nations. The United Nations is capable of maintaining the peace provided it is given adequate support by its member nations. Despite the difficulties that it has experienced so far and it has done remarkably well in my opinion-in the space

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age it should be a fully effective instrument of peace. As soon as it can it should sponsor a space program. The International Geophysical Year will end on December 31, 1958. At that time, the United Nations should assume the burden of continuing that program. Its ultimate object should be the establishment of a United Nations Space Force that will have the capability of keeping the world under surveillance, thus keeping peace on earth. The exploration and use of space by its member nations should be co-ordinated through a Space Headquarters in the United Nations. It would be a tragedy for the Free World if the Soviets were so far ahead in their space program that they would flout the United Nations and go ahead on their own. It is for this reason that the United States, which is the other nation best prepared to contribute to a United Nations space program now, should spare no effort, no resource and no people in advancing its own program. It is in the interest of the Free World that it do so.