Long Way to Go

Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who served as an armored force major in Libya in 1942 and knows how it feels to fight without air superiority, stepped into a Senate hearing room last week and fired off another broadside

(TIME, May 7) in the battle for a bigger Air Force. What Lodge wants is a combat-ready Air Force of 150 groups.

For two hours, behind closed doors, Lodge spelled out his plan. Under the present program for a 95-group Air Force, he said, the U.S. will be able to muster only one-third of the tactical aviation it would need to repel an invasion of Western Europe. The U.S., he argued, needs a minimum of 50 full tactical air groups for ground support, 38 interceptor groups for home defense, and 62 groups of long-range strategic bombers, plus fleets of heavy transports. Such an aerial armada would take three years to build, and cost a staggering $96 billion, more than the entire U.S. budget for 1951. To win World War II, he reminded the Senators, the U.S. had an air force of 243 groups.

Obviously, Lodge had influential help in his homework. Next to him at the green committee table sat Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter, who is committed to the Administration's 95-group limit. He has not officially urged a 150 group Air Force, but if anyone should ask Finletter, he is behind the idea 100%.

Actually, the Air Force has a long way to go before it can count even 95 combat-ready groups. Just how far came out last week in testimony at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. There, prodded by the committee, an Air Force general confessed that the U.S. has exactly 147 giant, ten-engined 8-36s, the intercontinental A-bomb carrier which the Air Force ballyhoos as the nation's biggest deterrent to the Russians. Of the 147, only 87 are in condition to fly; the other 60 are squatting in factories, undergoing a $2,500,000 modernization job. New ones are rolling off production lines at a snail's-pace five per month.

When a blab-mouthed Congressman leaked this news to the press, the Air Force let out an anguished cry. For months it has been shifting the big planes from base to base, doing all it could to make its handful of B-36s look like a mighty fleet. Even some Congressmen were shocked by the leak. Said Senator Dick Russell, who presided over the MacArthur hearing and did his level best to protect official secrets: "It is difficult to conceive of such utter lack of responsibility . . . [This] might well be the cause of World War III."

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