BLUNDERS OF THE BRASS

...It is abstractions of torpedoes or wing edges or, like the General Motors Oldsmobile now parked outside my window, it is a silvery bomb, fins and all, as beautiful and as deadly as a shark...

...or the stamina of animals— the ram, the lion, or the wolverine...

...If we let the military be our masters instead of our servants, we can not only destroy the American dream, but we can extinguish, perhaps for generations, the dreams of our brothers seeking liberty around the world...

...It will distort our foreign policy according to strategic considerations without hesitation, as when it builds our entire "defense" around mass-bombing, and ignores for years the problems of defense at home...

...This is the achievement of revolutionary technological developments which might provide an air defense for the United States...

...Thus Lovett revealed that at the crucial place—the Office of the Secretary of Defense—where American armed might must be directed by civilian minds who understand civilian planning and production, the Secretary was again, as so often in the past, having trouble getting cooperation from the brass hats...

...It produced so many different scapegoats that the obfusca-tion shows how confused the Army chain of command was when it came to planning, producing, and purchasing ammunition...

...This was well-demonstrated in the case of Capt...

...Now, after a few months of the new Administration, we might well look through the tinted windshield ($35 extra), and ask ourselves where we are going behind this radiator cap, where we are heading in a society increasingly dominated by the military...

...In the magazine Air Force, spokesman for military aviation, this view is sharply attacked, and it is said the secret reports spoke only of shooting down 60 per cent of incoming planes, at the most...

...Lovett received an answer which for him completely clarified the situation...

...The parade of witnesses before Congress gave volumes of contradictory testimony...

...It has thrown a cloak of secrecy over much of our industry, many of our best brains, and many of the vital technical developments which we must know if we are to survive...

...This method, which Lovett said goes back to George Washington, was laid aside during World War II, but the military went back to it after the war...

...Clark receive priority on all ammunition shipments...

...A story Time magazine sent in for security clearance was held for 67 days...

...In the Twenties, the anonymous artisans of Detroit decorated Hudsons and Es-sexes with strictly utilitarian thermometers encased in pure glass and nickel...

...What they actually recommended is known only to God, the high brass and, apparently, to the Alsop brothers, who imply in their column that an expenditure of 20 billion dollars would provide a mystic and magic umbrella which would protect us from attack from the skies...

...Rickover and a few others like him in the service are adjusting as best they can to a world in which science will try to serve the military, but the military doggedly refuses to learn the ABC's of handling scientists...

...Or, as I believe, it may be that no such umbrella can ever be built, and 20 billion dollars would virtually be thrown away...

...This is the most serious example in recent years of the gap between civilian and military arms of the government, and it is but one of many...

...The military has scorned civil defense as some ridiculous kind of bush-league amateur soldiery...

...Observers in Washington do not doubt that the airing of this scandal was instrumental in making up President Eisenhower's mind to re-affirm, as he did in his recent message to Congress, the American doctrine of civilian control of the military...

...The error behind the ammunition shortage was mainly that no one expected the Korean war to last so long...

...Today the power of American bombs and the power of American industry are indissolubly wedded and shine radiantly on each other, as symbolized by the General Motors president in the post of Secretary of Defense...

...Van Fleet...

...No Progressive reader will need to be told that Senator Harry F. Byrd has often symbolized the worst aspects of the Congressional system...

...The outcries from the rest of Congress, the press, and the public, in this and in other matters, ate the only insurance we have that this production-power machine which now carries us all will not grow into still more of a Frankenstein...

...Mark Clark in Tokyo, Nov...

...In a time when Congress is much-maligned for failing to live up to its obligations, it must be said that a great campaign of civilians calling the military to account began when the Senate Armed Forces Committee heard Gen...

...Pentagon observers support Lovett in placing the greater part of the blame for the ammunition shortages upon an antiquated system of ordnance procurement...

...We might resist the service publicists, but we can not properly answer them until we have the facts now withheld by the service censors...

...Lovett testified his "banker's instinct" led him to doubt the ammunition reports from the Chief of Ordnance...

...The Navy's archaic personnel selection system makes small allowance for proper appreciation of technical achievement...

...spiritually it is still the sword of brute force which all American tradition tells us can not be an instrument to build a better world...

...About all that can be authoritatively stated is that several study groups of scientists have worked for the past few years on the ghastly problems involved in shooting down incoming enemy bombers...

...The record now runs to many volumes...

...In the case of the ammunition shortage, it is obvious that there were times in the past when it would have done us grievous harm to have let the American public—and the Communist world—know that we had a severe shortage of such a simple production item as ammunition...

...For example, former Secretary of Defense Robert H. Lovett, like President Truman, has said that in the Wake Island Conference of May, 1950, Gen...

...Brien McMahon while the latter was chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy...

...Rickover's case was in many unfortunate respects an astounding parallel with that of Brig...

...Time was when our radiator caps reflected the spirit of pure flight, in the form of outstretched wings...

...Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the New York Times and a General in the Reserves, has called the ammunition shortage "an alarming example of the way in which secrecy can actually weaken security...

...H. G. Rickover, chief of the atomic submarine command, who was scheduled to be retired by the Navy until Congressional action and publicity stirred up a storm of protest...

...The spokesmen for the Air Force do not believe in defense by defensive means, but by offense...

...Formerly editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he has interpreted the march of military science in many magazines both under his own name and in collaboration with Albert Einstein, Harold C. Urey, and the late Sen...

...He has not...

...or the ancient gods of beauty and power—Venus and Pegasus...

...However, the Rickover story got out—and although one civilian Secretary of the Navy had admitted he dared not ask Navy promotion boards to promote Rickover, the present Secretary, after having had his arm twisted by a Congressional committee, completely reversed himself and found a way to schedule Rickover for promotion...

...Like Mitchell, Rickover is a personality with some rough edges...

...The celebrated judgment that war is too serious a business to be left to generals was never so clearly demonstrated as in the many-sided squabble over the ammunition shortages in Korea...

...They preach defense by threat, by mass bombing, and by retaliation...

...Today our radiator "art" simulates jet planes...

...He decided to cable some inquiries directly to Gen...

...Most heretical of all, he has sometimes assigned commanders to work under lieutenants...

...Under the ordnance procurement system, an ammunition order now goes to 42 different divisions and must be cleared by more than 200 officials before it becomes a contract...

...Harry F. Byrd prepared and released to the press a red-hot letter asking $64 billion questions about what the Army had done with money Congress had appropriated for it...

...Only eternal vigilance can manage the self-starting and self-accelerating dynamism of our powerful military machine...

...the Time story would then be released from the security safes...

...Physically the jet is more beautiful than a Prussian bayonet...

...This lies behind the strong language of the President's message to Congress on the reorganization of the Department of Defense...

...In seeking to establish that each service has the method by which it can inflict the most pain on our fellowman, with practically no pain to ourselves, the services foster the growing American neurosis that there must be some way to win the cold war without toil and sweat, or some way to win a hot war without tears and blood...

...Later it was revealed that some high Navy officialdom was considering a proposal to "leak" a story favorable to the brass on the Rickover case to another magazine, so that Navy's side would be presented first...

...IV To accept the ingenuity of the jet plane as our instrument of national policy would be to let the mythology of American production lead us away from that tradition established by our forefathers who recognized the instruments of barbarism for what they were...

...At present military secrecy keeps anyone from knowing the truth about still other vast plans of fundamental importance to the free world...

...Worse yet, the ammunition scandal revealed how high and low brass will conspire to keep civil authorities from the very facts they seek and must have to make the basic decisions required under our system of government...

...A driving genius at getting things done, he assembled a working crew of scientists and engineers who have brought in a genuine atomic power plant while the Atomic Energy Commission power program has been bogged down for years in bureaucracy and indecision...

...No one who has not seen the Pentagon at work can realize what importance he rightly attached to this statement...

...or in any of its component agencies, should be performed independently of the direction, authority, and control of the Secretary of Defense . . ." Did you think the Secretary of Defense already had these powers...

...In so doing it has let a lot of minor secrets like atom bomb technology dribble away, but it has successfully kept the biggest secret ever wilfully withheld from mankind—an accurate knowledge and emotional understanding of the nature of the next war...

...The Navy brass had him slated for retirement, and meanwhile they wrapped him in a cotton blanket of censorship...

...he says repeatedly he does not care for rank, but for spirit, brains, and getting on with the job...

...A radar and interception system, if the leaks are correct, combined with an all-out civil defense, might enable us to survive the initial atomic blitz with which World War III might start...

...beyond that, it is now clear that MacArthur expected to win, in a pinch, with atomic bombardment...

...In the case of the atomic submarine project, however, the secrecy imposed by the military has kept, and still keeps, little useful information from the enemy, but keeps the public uninformed of revolutionary changes atomic power will bring to naval strategy and to the world economy...

...20, 1952...

...It now grapples in secret with technological and temperamental questions about the ability of the United States to prevent1 or withstand atomic bombardment, but it has no disposition to allow the public to debate the real issues of how to survive the next war, if it should come...

...His officers are not permitted to wear uniforms at their work...

...Douglas Mac-Arthur gave assurances that the Korean War was all but over...

...Ill Rickover did not back into Lovett's "buzz-saw," but walked forward into it, chin up...

...Almost alone among service technicians, Rickover has understood the scientific and civilian point of view...

...Unless held in constant check, its propaganda and its censorship together can warp the true spirit of America...

...It will fight true civil control to the last...

...II The administrative snarls of the Ordnance Department are only symptomatic of the kind of thinking which the military can produce if left to operate in a vacuum...

...To the brass they represent a different race—civilians...

...Written by (or at least for) an ex-General who knows the old Army games, it pins down, it is hoped, the authority of the Defense Secretary: "With my full support the Secretary must exercise over the Department of Defense the direction, authority and control . . . vested in him . . . no function in any part of the Department...

...This we shall assuredly do if we let a militarized America blow out the warm radiance of the Torch of Liberty and substitute for it the cold gleam of The Chromium Bomb...

...This contribution to our blustering and bribing cannot be underestimated...

...To some extent one has to choose which man to believe...

...Less than two hours later Sen...

...It will waste money and manpower incredibly unless we are in the driver's seat...

...One item was decidedly incorrect, he said, and he decided, for the one time while Secretary, to go outside the usual channels...

...Meanwhile, the service publicists, with the hearty connivance of the advertising agents of American industry, herald one new magic weapon after another, deepening the classic American belief that with American ingenuity and riches we can "go it alone...

...This is at the heart of the secret controversy over new missiles which can allegedly shoot down 100 per cent of aerial attackers, and it is at the heart of a hundred similar controversies connected with the services...

...This is far more than the present official judgment that we could shoot down 30 per cent of incoming planes, which in turn is three times as high a proportion as air defenders were able to achieve against bombers in World War II...

...He also directed—causing internal horrors in these days of inter-service rivalries—that Navy and Air Force funds not urgently needed should be diverted to ammunition...

...Billy Mitchell, the early-day advocate of airpower...

...Some of our service secretaries have had as little authority as a coalition premier in France...

...The military, which after World War I would have stifled the electronics industry by keeping "the wireless" a Navy and a secret development, in 1953 has the electronics industry all but smothered in secrecy again...

...Some contracts have taken 287 days of paperwork...

...He is also a prime advocate of civilian-minded-ness on technical projects...

...But knowing what could be done to us would better enable Americans to decide whether we should gear the production-power machine towards ever more hideous machines of massacre, or whether we should put into action the words of Eisenhower to the newspaper editors, when he called for a greater and grander Point Four program as an alternative to war and the preparation for war...

...One of Secretary Lovett's parting shots on leaving Washington was that the technical branches of the services need reform above all— but that to start on this reform "would be no more dangerous than backing into a buzz saw...

...MacArthur denies this, but in denying it shows again how far his own thinking ran to political and politicalMICHAEL AMRINE writes of developments in the Pentagon for the North American Newspaper Alliance and a number of magazines...

...It is vitally important for America to realize the issues involved in air defense...

...Rickover is the one man to whom all atomic experts give full credit for having pioneered atomic power for the Navy...

...He concluded the Army's ammunition schedules were "based on hope rather than realities," and he directed that Gen...

...military lines, in outright defiance of the traditional American attitude that the military is only an executive officer of the civil authority...

...But in the ammunition scandal the simple black-and-white approach under which he labors enabled him to ask most pertinently the blunt questions as to why these supersonic services of ours could not even furnish the simplest item of all— shells to shoot at the enemy...