Clear & Present Danger

"The world situation could explode at any time, and we must make every day count," said the President last week. Top officers in the Pentagon confided to newsmen that they lived in fear of a Russian attack this summer; they were praying for just "six more months" to prepare.

In the face of this warning and this fear, what was the state and urgency of the U.S. defense effort last week?

The Army cut the draft quota from 40,000 in May down to 20,000 in June. The aircraft industry was still jogging along on a 40-hour week, pleading for skilled technicians, far behind Harry Truman's expansive prediction of a 15,000-a-year rate by year's end; they would be lucky to reach a rate of 500 a month. In many defense plants, retooling was behind schedule. Manufacturers scornfully called DO (Defense Order) priority certificates "merely hunting licenses."

Dead Ducks. What could the nation make of a leadership that was in a war that it did not fight as a war, in a crisis it did not treat as critical, arguing for preparation that might not prepare in time? Before congressional committees, the Pentagon's top military men discoursed confidently of their forces--not the forces of today, but what they plan to have two years from now. And Mobilizer Charles Wilson was going around announcing that Stalin would be "a dead duck"--if he attacked the U.S. any time after Jan. 1, 1953. In its unintentional invitations for Russia to attack while the coast was still fairly clear, it outdid Louis Johnson's famed fatuous boast: "If Joe Stalin starts something at 4 o'clock in the morning . . . America will be on the job at 5."

The blame for the nation's current unreadiness went far back. Three years ago, the Joint Chiefs had asked for a $31 billion budget, and had been told to scale it down to $18 billion, which they considered a rock-bottom minimum--only to have the Budget Bureau whack it down to $14.3 billion. They had angrily fought the cuts, up to a point. Then they reluctantly conceded that civilian authority should prevail, and made speeches about how they had no desire to dislocate the economy. Many a Congressman and many a citizen had complacently said: "Well, the military always ask for more than they need." Cutting "fat" in the military budget was a popular sport in those days.

Things As Usual. These were past errors; the error being made today was the ready-in-'53, no fuss-no strain philosophy. This failure of leadership ran higher than the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Growled a Seattle lumberman: "As long as Harry does things as usual, then everybody else will do things as usual. Harry said there is no war on, so who's excited enough to go volunteer to chop down a tree for an Army barracks? Nobody, that's who."

The failure was big enough to concern those who supported either Douglas MacArthur or Harry Truman in the great dispute. For both Truman and MacArthur agreed that there was a clear and present global Communist threat to the U.S. In the face of such a threat the U.S. today was not doing enough, fast enough.

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