Man of the Hour

By his own admission, gregarious, blustering Defense Secretary Louis Johnson is a man with an elephant-thick hide. But the mounting charges that his heavy-footed economy was wrecking U.S. defenses stung him last week into a trumpeting roar of defiance: "The defenses of the United States as of today are, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, myself, and the President, sufficient unto the needs of the hour."

That was not quite saying, as he had the week before, that U.S. defenses were "in grand shape." But it seemed on the face of it almost as far from the truth. After eleven months in office, Louis Johnson's belligerent optimism was beginning to sound a little tinny. Items:

P: By bottling up $615 million of the funds voted by Congress for a 58-group Air Force, the Administration has cut airplane procurement so heavily that the Air Force will be reduced, in four years, to 38 groups. Tactical squadrons are withering to nothing, and the Air Force, with a minimum of heavy bombers, is also dangerously short of first-line fighters, one of the nation's prime defenses against airborne atomic-bomb attacks.

P:Navy carrier air groups have beencut from 14 to nine in the new budget. The Marine Corps' ready combat outfits have been cut from eleven landing battalions to six. Of the Marines' 23 crack fighter squadrons, eleven have been closed out for economy.

P: In the U.S. there is only one Army division that approaches top combat efficiency in training, material and personnel. Even war's double time required a full year to bring a division to fighting shape.

P: Expert and irreplaceable ordnance workers have been fired from the Rock Island and Watervliet arsenals, have drifted to other jobs. Gone was a priceless reservoir of talent.

P:The U.S. still has no defensive radar screen, no adequate protection against new-type Russian submarines.

It was true that Johnson had cut his civilian payrolls by 157,542--with 11,000 yet to go. And even his severest critics were willing to add that he had squeezed some fat and inefficiency out of the armed services. The trouble was that he had also ruthlessly sliced away muscle, where muscle was never more urgently needed. If by these methods Louis Johnson actually thought he could muster a force "sufficient unto the needs of the hour," it was obvious that Johnson & Co. didn't know what time it was.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.