"In Our Homeland"

Training for combat, with no ifs, ands or buts, is what the Army & Navy will demand in any postwar program of military service for young Americans. Education of youth in carpentry, cooking, care of the teeth--as the President has good-naturedly suggested--is not the services' idea at all.

As they prepared to take their case before the new Congress, Army & Navy registered a firm dissent from their Commander in Chief.

"For my part," Navy Secretary Forrestal stated last week, "I hope that discussion of universal military training will keep focused on the fact that the weapons of modern warfare can be operated only by trained men. A novice is helpless and vulnerable. ... In a period of flying projectiles traveling faster than sound, war can come overnight. But we cannot train an aerial gunner overnight. Only a skilled, trained radar man can operate radar. . . . Since attack can now be almost instantaneous, we can guarantee our survival only if we have a defense capable of the same speed."

Forrestal echoed the Army: the sole reason for military training is national defense. In a circular sent to officers the Army set forth: "America probably will be the initial objective of the aggressors in any next war, and the first engagement of that war will quite possibly be fought in our own homeland. . . . Universal mili-- tary training will be our preparation for the next war."

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