Dangerous Terrain

Worried by snipers, the Army moved warily across dangerous political terrain. The objective was legislation for a national military policy after the war. Last week the Army thought it had a sound, if tentative, plan. But powerful forces were ready to oppose it.

Keystone of the Army's peacetime plan is universal military training. If the Army had its way this is how it would work:

One year's compulsory training for every able-bodied 18-year-old would provide the Army with a constant force-in-being of some half-million trainees. For emergencies the Army would have at hand a pool of ex-trainees, to be mobilized like its present force, by Selective Service. Men who had become essential to a war industry or had dependents would receive the same deferments as now. Men would not be called by age classes as in Europe.

After the first year of training, citizen soldiers would get the chance to become reserve officers, either through R.O.T.C. or at officer candidate schools. Graduates of officers' schools would have to spend another year on active duty, keep alert, from then on, with correspondence courses and short annual periods of soldiering in the field. Most would go on the inactive list at 30, although the Army would hang onto tiptop reserve officers until the regular retirement age (64).

Backing its reserve force, the Army also wants a permanent regular force (including air force) of several times the size it was before World War I. Around this professional core it hoped to be able to group 4,000,000 troops almost overnight--about the minimum the Army believes necessary if the nation is to survive.

Slim Chance? Already entrenched against some phases of the Army's plan is the National Guard Association. Reason: the Guard fears the Army would scrap it as superfluous and no longer practical (except possibly as state militias set up for police and disaster work). Stoutly on record as favoring universal military training, the politically potent Association will nevertheless fight any attempt to wash out their organization. Major General Ellard A. Walsh, Association president, said: "The chances of the Regular Army to impose its ideas of a military establishment on the nation are probably slim."

Some educators may also resist any Government attempt to go into what they consider their field--the training of the country's youth.

The Navy, just getting around to its own postwar plans, is also likely to oppose another phase of Army planning. To cap the legislation it is after, the Army wants Congress to create a single department of national defense; the Navy is against it.

But the most formidable opponent of all, if the Army waits too long to ask for its legislation, may be the people. Army men fear there may be a popular revulsion against military training after the war, fully expect to be called "militarists" once again. Yet there have already been attempts to postpone the decision on conscription until peacetime. Most powerful spokesman to date: the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, claiming to represent 26,000,000 U.S. Protestants, which has already made a public appeal for deferment of any Congressional action "until after the war."

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