No Easy Way

In standard military thinking, the top brass in the armed services always ask for as many billions as they dare, are still not satisfied that they get enough. In Boston last week, the Army's Chief of Staff Omar Bradley took a different line.

There was a limit, he said, to the money the U.S. could invest in its own security. Added General Bradley: "It is clearly apparent that in the absence of any precipitant danger, the nation must curb within reason that share of the national income it would devote to its common defenses . . . The danger of conflict today appears to have slackened, partly because we are chewing sedatives in this constant war of nerves. . ."

He wanted his audience (a group of New England manufacturers) to realize, however, that there was no "easy and popular way to armed security." Air power was the primary attack weapon, but in the long run, said Infantryman Bradley, "a war between nations is reduced to one man defending his land while another tries to invade it. Whatever the devastation of his cities and the disorder in his existence, man will not be conquered until you fight him for his life."

Bradley left no doubt that the Army would stand solidly behind the trimmed-down budget Harry Truman had sent to Congress. Though the Army had lost about $1 billion in the process, he said: ". . . I would much prefer to take some military risk rather than have to weather the dangers of an economic bust."

In Washington, Defense Secretary James Forrestal was thinking the same way. Said Forrestal: "A continuing burden of military armaments upon this country might produce precisely that result which some of our contemporaries would like to see. It would produce an economic collapse which would so wreck this country as to make its position in the world an impotent rather than a potent one."

The Navy was already working out a thinning diet for itself. Navy Secretary John Sullivan announced that the Navy was closing down nine air stations (eight of them on the West Coast and in the Pacific) and laying up 72 vessels (only 15 of them major combat ships) to squeeze inside its budget. In doing so, the Navy was also shifting its weight around, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, where the Navy would add 30 new combat ships. But the Navy, already possessor of the mightiest aircraft carrier fleet in history, was still going ahead with the building of its mammoth 65,000-ton supercarrier United States, hoping to prove that long-range bombing is its business as well as the Air Force's.

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