the GROWING POWER of the MILITARY

...Air Force will continue to support the Air Scout program for its public relations and public education values and although the existing agreement between this headquarters precludes the active use of the Air Scout movement as a personnel procurement source it is recognized that the program presents an admirable medium for the dissemination of the missions, objectives, and problems of the USAF to a widespread and receptive public audience...

...There is a magazine and book branch which prepares material for magazine articles and books...

...His successors pursued the same policy because the officer corps wanted a large, permanently guaranteed force for them to command...

...They believe that the purpose of the R.O.T.C...

...All this was accomplished before the White House was occupied by the three generals: Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, General Wilton B. Persons as Assistant to the President, and Brigadier General Andrew J. Goodpaster as White House Staff Secretary...

...In addition to the Secretary of Defense, who is legally a member, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not a member by law, has regularly attended meetings...

...Representatives R. J. Twyman of Illinois, Robert H. Mollohan of West Virginia, and Lee Metcalf of Montana were among a number of other members of Congress who protested the military infiltration of civilian jobs...

...It has a Special Events Branch which arranges parades and other military observances across the nation...

...When the war ended, the military took advantage of the unsettled condition of the world to consolidate its power...

...Still another illustration of the tremendous public relations activity of the military establishment is the work of the Pictorial Branch...

...by the Department of Defense is citizenship training, literary training, training in morale and training in the type of things that young people ought to have...

...teaching should be to indoctrinate and inspire rather than to inculcate that capacity for critical understanding which is the presumed object of a civilian educational system...

...We have come perilously close to turning America into a garrison state, a state in which public opinion is so security conscious that military leadership is welcomed in the civil service, military budgets dominate the economy, military considerations largely determine foreign policy, and the officer corps expands its influence even into the voluntary associations of citizens...

...And in May, 1951, in answer to a question from Senator Styles Bridges on this point General Marshall replied: "I can recall no occasion when Mr...

...The activities of the Defense Department, said the Cordiner Report, "are spread throughout the 48 states and are located in 16,000 cities...

...The fact that this influence has not declined since 1952 is evident from the way in which Admiral Lewis Strauss, until recently chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others in the Pentagon, with the assistance of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were able to scuttle Harold Stassen's efforts to negotiate a disarmament agreement with the Russians in 1957 in spite of the fact that President Eisenhower and the head of the Policy Planning Division of the State Department had given their approval to Stassen's proposal...

...We are being forced to shift the American way of life into the pattern of the garrison state...

...That this is a profitable business practice may be deduced from Senator Paul Douglas' revelation in the Senate July 1, 1957, that 92 per cent of military contracts were negotiated without competitive bidding...

...The "request for this agreement," said the June-July, 1956, magazine Scouting, "came from the commanding general of the Army Air Forces...

...The Cordiner Report to the Secretary of Defense valued the property of the Defense Department at $160 billion, "by any yardstick of measurement the world's largest organization...

...In 1941 the Army jumped to 1.4 million men from 267,767 the previous year...

...that war with Russia was just around the ,corner" and that a large military establishment with all the trappings would be essential in the foreseeable future...

...The Washington Star reported February 2, 1947, that "Ten of the 20 men ranking as executive officers in the State Department have been brought in during recent months from the military services...

...Is it small wonder that the Defense Department, the world's largest organization, should dwarf the rest of the United States government both in size and in influence...

...There was, for example, scarcely a ripple over this protest by Senator Ralph E. Flanders, Vermont Republican, on the Senate floor: "It is not only that we are sacrificing to defense our standard of living and the free independence of our economic life...

...they share in the preparation of the national budget...

...Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg said in 1952: "A large part of the training as envisaged...

...This branch, for example, persuades national organizations to invite a general or admiral to speak at the organization's national convention...

...As a producer of officers, R.O.T.C...

...Roosevelt also excluded the State Department so that it had only a peripheral role even in matters that might determine postwar foreign policy...

...The tendency of generals and admirals to be tough, with a guided missile or an atom bomb as the big stick of the space age, needs to be curbed and eliminated or we shall again and again be led to the very threshold of war, for concentration of power in military hands is always regarded as a provocation and threat to other nations...

...This principle has been carefully observed by every American generation until our own...

...Military assets, for example, are three times as great as the combined assets of United States Steel, American Telephone and Telegraph, Metropolitan Life Insurance, General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey...

...and in various ways they exercise an influence in civilian organizations...

...Wherever the military finds an opportunity it moves into other areas of our national life...

...is compulsory for the first two years of student life...

...Writing of these pre-war years, Donald Nelson, the prominent business executive who headed the W7ar Production Board, said in his Arsenal of Democracy that the Army felt itself "starved and ignored...

...Congress rejected compulsory military training and whittled down the requested size of the standing army in passing the National Defense Act of 1920, but elements in the Army, working with Congressional opponents of President Wilson, succeeded in limiting the authority of the civilian Secretary of War over the Army...

...A few Senators and Congressmen protested this development but Congress as a whole acquiesced...

...Donald Nelson, concerned with this lust for power, warned in the concluding section of his book that "the question of military control will confront us not only in war but in peace...

...Variety has estimated that an additional $6,000,000 is what the various military shows would cost on a radio time and talent basis...

...Whether by design or accident the public debate on the NSA revolved almost entirely around the issue of unification of the armed forces...

...In one year this branch helped private motion pictures develop movies favorable to the Army which "would add up to about $30 million" of free publicity, according to a Defense Department spokesman...

...In 1948-49 the office of Naval Research spent approximately $20,000,000 on about 500 projects in more than 150 colleges and universities...

...This attitude of ratification of military desires is precisely what the Pentagon wants and cultivates...

...But this is not impossible if we begin to think for ourselves and organize for the democratic replacement of military domination by civilian authority...

...This would have been unthinkable 50 years ago or even 20 years ago...

...The Pentagon's propaganda machine is divided into sections such as the Press Department, which sees that a military press conference is held every morning and afternoon so as to get into morning and afternoon papers...

...1956, tried to stop the mounting control by military men...

...It has a speakers' bureau and turns out speeches for officers and reserve officers to deliver...

...Yet the most important feature of the bill provides for a National Security Council to advise the President on the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security...

...There was also an expansion of military training units on college campuses in the post-war years...

...A fifth step was the organization of a tremendous public relations program whose purpose is to build a climate friendly to the military and also sell the current military program to the people...

...Although defeated on UMT, the military succeeded in 1951 in making the Selective Service System a permanent institution and in 1955 in getting compulsory reserve legislation adopted solely to establish the principle of universal conscription...

...In addition, military officers have office space in and function in the House and Senate office buildings "assisting" some Congressional committees...

...Both have faithfully performed their vows, the Pentagon creating a climate of fear of war and industry responding profitably with the weapons...

...Twyman in 1948 lamented the fact that the President "has seen fit to staff the traditionally civilian positions of government, particularly in the diplomatic and consular service, with retired Army and Navy officers...

...ed our foreign policy, though rarely does a public official acknowledge this usurpation as boldly as did A. A. Ribicoff, then a key member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in 1952...

...In my opinion," Ribicoff, now Governor of Connecticut, said, "in the last year or two more foreign policy has been made in the Pentagon than in the State Department...

...Unfortunately, a combination of Congressional willingness to let military men run the war and a tendency of President Roosevelt to deal directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff resulted in a weakening of civilian control...

...This widespread operation gives the Pentagon wide influence in domestic and foreign policy...

...He added: "First of all such a program must be the responsibility of the federal government...

...The story of this drive for military control begins more than 40 years ago, during World War I. The Army's General Staff prepared a bill which would have increased its power and provided for a large standing army and compulsory military training for teen-age boys...

...In spite of these military gains the Army remained relatively small, having only 138,569 men and a budget of $273,421,902 in 1935...

...Another World War I development was the National Defense Act of 1916 which authorized the War Department to establish R.O.T.C...

...In 1950 military public relations received an appropriation of more than 9.5 million dollars...

...system," wrote Walter Millis...

...Since the armed forces are as concerned with influencing Congress as they are the Administration, an effective military lobby composed of "liaison officers" with Congress has been developed...

...Financial returns and prestige were big factors in university decisions to continue accepting military contracts after the war had ended...

...So fully does he believe this that he gives priority to the Pentagon over civilian groups of government charged with over-all economic or budgetary planning...

...Colonel Neblett wrote that "when the bill did not pass the Pentagon was thrown into complete confusion...

...In the United States alone the Pentagon owns more than 32 million acres of land, and in foreign countries an additional 2.6 million acres...

...they have an extensive propaganda network that makes carefully planned use of the press, Hollywood, radio, television, and other media...

...Truman has acted adversely to the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense in relation to the State Department...

...It is hardly necessary to point out that the vast expansion of the American military machine cannot be stopped or the trend reversed without a major revolution in our foreign policy as well as in our whole culture...

...So thorough has been the military penetration of civilian government and civilian life that it could hardly have been accomplished without some careful planning...

...As a result of this reasoning and the need to appease its own insatiable appetite, the military entered a marriage of convenience with big business...

...The big companies with scarcely art exception hire many retired generals and admirals either as consultants or vice presidents...

...He said: "Already we have a general in the first echelon of the Immigration and Naturalization Service...

...Between 85 and 90 per cent of the aircraft industry's production in 1955, for example, went to the armed forces...

...A few months later the New York Times revealed that when General John H. Hilldring was made an Assistant Secretary of State "he brought with him to the State Department 26 of his assistants in the War Department...

...The chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, William Langer, told the Senate in June, 1948, about "military men who were taken out of the Army by the high military authorities and placed in the civil service of the United States where we cannot get rid of them without changing our entire civil service structure...

...The first step was to eliminate civilian control over the armed forces by establishing a supreme General Staff nominally under civilian control but, as James Forrestal charged, "in actual practice and result really in the hands of one military Chief of Staff...

...Shortly thereafter the War Department, without any legal right, began its pressure on land grant colleges to make military training compulsory for all first and second year students...

...units...

...Even these do not cover the amazing number of propaganda activities...

...is wasteful and inefficient since 73 per cent of them quit as soon as their required service is over...

...When a particular effort to seize control was frustrated by the President or by Donald Nelson "the military leaders took another approach to secure the same result...

...The next step was the transfer of military officers to key posts in civilian departments of government, especially in the State Department...

...But this is only part of the story, for many of the largest civilian industries are themselves directly or indirectly receiving funds from the Pentagon...

...Army officers were, in effect, permitted to go over the head of their civilian superior to present their position directly to Congressional committees...

...Generals and admirals, colonels and captains, spoke throughout the land at every meeting to which they could wangle an invitation...

...The Navy succeeded in getting the Hollo-way Plan made law, permitting it to pay the full tuition, fees, books, laboratory expenses and an additional retainer of $600 a year to Naval R.O.T.C...

...The war had brought an opportunity for increased military influence...

...The Secretaries of War and Navy were not only excluded from important strategy matters, but were not even put on the routine distribution list for the papers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...By 1952 more than 300,000 students or about one-fourth of the male college population were in Army, Navy, or Air Force R.O.T.C...

...Colonel William Neblett, who for years was stationed in the Pentagon, asserted in 1953 in his book Pentagon Politics, that the Pentagon planned a nationwide campaign to create the impression "that we were living in a state of undeclared emergency...

...A fourth development was the National Security Act of 1947 through which the military establishment gained a formal voice in determining foreign and domestic policy...

...Already we have a general in the second echelon...

...enrollment for 1959 is 312,852 students at a cost of $30,798,000...

...The total acreage is greater than the areas of Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland combined...

...In a democratic society the military is simply one branch of the executive with no authority or duty other than that of defending the nation's interests against external enemies...

...Then the American Army was small and clearly under civilian control...

...They want uniformity throughout the whole R.O.T.C...

...The 1945 annual report of the Boy Scouts of America revealed an agreement with the Air Force "whereby 12 liaison officers have been designated by the Army Air Force to cooperate in making more effective the Air Scout program...

...It also wanted UMT in order to indoctrinate young America in militarism...

...And as between the Bureau of the Budget and the Joint Chiefs of Staff," he said, "I will place my confidence in the latter, in regard to what our national defense needs are...

...So effective was the military's program and so clear the evidence of Communist expansion that many civilians who normally would have insisted on a different course were prepared to let our strategy for dealing with communism be dominated by military considerations...

...The Joint Chiefs became so accustomed to power and to formulating major policy that they were unable to accept with good grace being overruled...

...By the close of World War II, however, Nelson was fearful of Army power...

...Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric, had pointed the way by suggesting both an alliance of big business and the military, and "a permanent war economy...

...The Army owns the largest motion picture studio in the East...

...in the execution of the part allotted to it...

...The generals simply did not dream that Congress would defy them...

...In practice this meant a military officer with immediate access to the President, and, in effect, functioning for the President on military matters...

...General Ira Eakey spoke of the "appallingly bad judgment" of the "old men" in Congress "who would have been eliminated in any other nation...

...The present pattern of military financing of academic research was begun in World War II...

...For some years the military has dominatJOHN M. SWOMLEY, JR., executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has long been a student of the increasing power of the military in American life...

...students in 52 colleges and universities...

...So firm has military control become that "the role of Congress" has indeed been "limited to voting the needed funds...

...Actually the armed forces use R.O.T.C...

...A sixth step in the expansion of military influence has been a large scale invasion of the field of education...

...These millions are greatly augmented through the Pentagon policy of persuading business firms as well as radio and TV networks to donate "publicity...

...Metcalf's effort failed, and the normally civilian Immigration and Naturalization Service passed completely over to military control...

...One of the most important of the Pentagon propaganda activities is pushed by the National Organization Branch through which officers cultivate officials of national civilian organizations to influence them to support the military line...

...Vinson stated his philosophy in the House March 30, 1949, when he asserted that the President's decision "is not the expert military view...

...It is stuff that we simply couldn't buy, and it is priceless...

...It sends exhibits to county and state fairs, to national conventions and universities...

...they never abandoned the sincere conviction that they could run things better and more expeditiously than the civilians...

...The lesson taught by these recent war years is clear: our whole economic and social system will be in peril if it is controlled by the military men...

...for indoctrination and propaganda purposes...

...The Air Force later stated in an official report: "The U.S...

...When this proposal was not adopted the Army took other steps to expand military influence over civil government...

...The huge professional officers' corps was converted into a propaganda organization, the like of which the world had never seen...

...It must be initiated and administered by the executive branch —by the President as Commander-in-Chief and by the War and Navy Departments...

...The economic power of the Pentagon reaches into every corner of the nation...

...Our top source for military judgment is the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...That the Army was conscious of its new power was evident in a paragraph in the January 18, 1947, Army and Navy Bulletin which began with these words: "Today the Army has virtual control of foreign affairs...

...By 1957 about 200 generals or admirals were on assignment to other departments of government, international or interservice agencies, more than 1,300 colonels or naval personnel of comparable rank, and about 6,000 officers of lower grade...

...industry must not be hampered by political witch-hunts, or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe tagged with a 'merchants of death' label...

...The networks and advertising agencies write off their contributions as "public service" except for agency executive expense accounts which the government foots...

...It has a "dislike of some of the less efficient methods of getting things done that are a part of our political process...

...In about half of the colleges R.O.T.C...

...Of equal importance is the fact that this must be, once and for all, a continuing program and not the creature of an emergency...

...Nelson pointed out that "from 1942 onward the Army people, in order to get control of our national economy, did their best to make an errand boy of the WPB...

...It seems to me that civilians should show up in here somewhere...

...In addition to the uniformed force, there were 1,348,766 civilian employees of the Defense Department, well over half of the civilian staff of the federal government...

...Similarly, the Defense Department's paid personnel total is about three times the number of all the employees of 'these companies...

...In fact one of its objects will be to eliminate emergencies so far as possible...

...These officers, who are well paid by the companies, in addition to their retirement pay ranging from $6,000 to $19,531 a year, provide a liaison between the big corporations and the Pentagon...

...The expected R.O.T.C...

...Even the Boy Scouts have not been overlooked...

...This has gone so far that today under Representative Carl Vinson's firm control the House Armed Services Committee is practically the alter ego of the Pentagon...

...It was only the combined efforts of church, farm, labor, and educational groups that stiffened Congressional resistance...

...Industry's role in this program is to respond and cooperate...

...The military mind, as Drew Middleton of the New York Times once observed, has an attitude of "conformity" in the "daily routines" that tends "to extend to thought processes as well...

...No people can turn the important decisions of life over to its army without eventually becoming controlled by that army...

...The director of Pentagon publicity in 1953 cited the Saturday Evening Post which "in the last year carried 57 articles" on military subjects, as one indication of its success...

...Military leaders are actively engaged in drafting and promoting legislation...

...Today in America the military has achieved such power in government, business, education, public opinion, and other key areas of our national life as to endanger the very basis of our democracy...

...In describing this work he said: "The impression they convey must be a correct one because much of the attitude of the public toward the Army, Navy, and Air Force . . . revolves around these pictures which have a very great influence on the public...

...A third development was the long campaign for universal military training from 1944 through 1955...

...We are sacrificing our freedom itself...

...Marshall defined this job as serving the President on all "matters relating to strategy, tactics and operation, the preparation and presentation of the joint military budget and on such other matters as he may consider pertinent to his constitutional function as Commander-in-Chief...

...The Pentagon," wrote Colonel Neblett, "turned on the heat...

...If we add the paid and unpaid reserves of 3,468,358 the total of those with a vested interest in the military establishment approximates 7,500,000...

...Democracy can flourish only if it is practiced...

...The Pentagon feared civilian schools would not give the right slant to citizenship training...

...Instead of curbing the Army or Navy, members of Congressional committees on military affairs developed a vested interest in expansion of the armed forces...

...The process has simply been accelerated since the White House was taken over...

...And so thoroughly has the civilian mind accepted this military culture that there is little organized protest...

...units in schools and colleges...

...In 1947 the Army earmarked $70,000,000 for basic studies in colleges...

...In 1953 there were nine Army generals and 58 colonels assigned to civilian agencies of government...

...The role of Congress is limited to voting the needed funds...

...Since Council decisions are not published, it is impossible for the American people to challenge the thinking that produces these far-reaching decisions...

...General Marshall had decided the Army would not take "no" from Congress...

...Most of these funds are administered by the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission...

...It is known, however, that when the military agencies and the State Department representatives disagree, the President makes the final decision...

...A Bureau of the Budget report, The United States at War, published in 1946, said that during World War II the Army sought "total control of the nation, its manpower, its facilities, its economy...

...Fifty years ago such warnings would not have gone unheeded...

...The danger to our people and to the world of this militarization of our society is great...

...These civilian and military personnel administer a yearly appropriation of more than $45 billion, roughly two thirds of the total federal budget for 1959...

...They are conducted abroad in 52 foreign countries...

...Even by 1920, after America's first world-wide military experience, the total personnel of the Army, the Navy, and the Marines was only 354,366...

...Wilson went on to suggest that every big company appoint a special executive to act as liaison man with the armed forces, with the commission of a colonel in the reserve...

...By 1956 the federal government was spending annually about $150 million for scientific research in colleges and universities and another $150 million was granted to universities for the operation of large government owned enterprises such as the Los Alamos and Argonne Laboratories...

...In this atmosphere at least seven steps were taken by the Pentagon leadership...

...By the end of 1957 the Regular Armed Forces totaled 2,794,883 and the military establishment was definitely in the saddle...

...In an address to the Army Ordnance Association in January, 1944, he warned that "the revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome in establishing a preparedness program and for that reason I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion...

...General George Marshall, who was the moving spirit behind most of the early efforts to expand military control, proposed "a Chief of Staff to the President, to serve the President in exercising his functions as constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces...

...The number would be much greater if retired officers were included, to say nothing of Air Force and Navy personnel...

...But the greatest danger is that we permit military considerations to guide our relations with other nations...

...We have moved so far in this direction that warnings from public officials are received with little or no concern by their fellow citizens or their fellows in Congress...

...Lee Metcalf in March...

...It was increased in 1951 to more than 12 million...