Men in Underwear

For weeks, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. collected facts from military and production records and from the Pentagon's top ground and air experts. This week he stepped to the floor of the U.S. Senate to tell what he had learned. The serious, studied words of the Senator from Massachusetts carried a jarring shock for the U.S. public: the presumption of U.S. air superiority in the great power struggle with Russia, said he, is more myth than reality.

Like the average citizen, Senator Lodge had been taking comfort in the belief that the U.S., with the world's greatest production facilities and a strategic air arm able to pepper Russia with atomic bombs, possessed a forbidding deterrent to Soviet attack. "The cold brutal fact," he had found to his dismay, "is that the U.S. does not have air supremacy, air superiority or anything like it ... On balance, air superiority as well as land superiority lies with the Soviet Union."

The Delicate Thread. Russia, said he, has supremacy in the air today "over most of the world's land mass. We excel them only in the quality of our long-range bombers and in numbers of atomic bombs. On this single fact, our security hangs by a delicate thread."

What bothered Massachusetts' Lodge most was the state of U.S. tactical air power--the fighters, fighter-bombers and light bombers needed to strike the enemy from the air and to support the nation's ground forces. .Lodge is no Air Force flyboy, but an armored-force veteran of World War II. He fought harder than any Republican for quick Senate approval of the Administration's troops-to-Europe program. But will those troops be moving into a trap, without air protection, as isolationists like Missouri's James Kem had argued?

Lodge conceded that they will be. "Without tactical air, the most mobile troops with maximum firepower per pound are still as naked as men in their underwear." As matters now stand, said Lodge, the West's forces are indeed shivering in their underwear. What is worse, the Air Force's contemplated 95 groups (or wings as they now are called) will not be enough to clothe them.

"The Jam We Are In." Best estimates credit Russia with a tactical air force of 16,000 to 20,000 planes, said Lodge, of which about 9,000 are free for an attack in the West. To assure air superiority to the proposed North Atlantic army, Lodge calculated that the U.S. and its allies need 18,000 tactical aircraft ready for battle.

How do those figures stack up against U.S. strength, present and planned? At the moment, the Air Force has little better than nine fighter-bomber wings--some 675 aircraft--available for support of U.S. ground forces overseas. The bulk of them are in Korea. In the blueprint for a 95-wing Air Force, there will be roughly 18 tactical wings of this kind, equivalent to one for each of the contemplated 18 U.S. divisions. At best, the 95-wing Air Force, properly equipped with the newest airplanes, is still at least 18 months away.

"That," said Senator Lodge, "gives you some idea of the jam we are in." Lodge thought that the U.S. should have at least 150 wings, preferably 175, with 48 of them tactical. The probable cost: about $25 billion a year. Can the U.S. afford it? Concluded Lodge: it has to.

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