Half Speed Is Hard

Debate over the pace of U.S. arms production boiled up last week. There are three views:

1) Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, chairman of the Senate preparedness subcommittee, gave his in a scathing report that deliveries of planes, tanks and radar sets are 30% to 70% behind schedule. The reason, says Texan Johnson, is that "we didn't have the courage to put guns ahead of butter ... to put the cause of liberty ahead of the pursuit of luxury."

2) Chief Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson defends present production rates, thinks that drastic cuts into the civilian production are unnecessary, and points out that some current production of arms has been properly sacrificed for the sake of expanding future capacity to make arms.

3) A small group (including Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas and Philip D. Reed, board chairman of General Electric) thinks that present arms production is too high, that the inflationary strain on the U.S. economy is a greater danger at the moment than Soviet Russia. If the Korean war stops, this view is likely to grow in influence.

"Guns v. Butter?" Senator Johnson has performed an important service in disclosing how badly production is lagging behind schedule. When Wilson says that production is nearly up to schedule, he means schedules that have been revised downward very sharply from the program he accepted with confidence when he took office a year ago. Commenting on the Johnson report, Defense Secretary Robert Lovett last week called it "a darned good report ... a good statement... of where we are now--not how we got there."

Johnson's "guns v. butter" explanation of what is wrong oversimplifies the case. Any rearmament program short of all-out mobilization runs into difficulties which were not fully appreciated a year ago. Half-speed rearmament is not half as hard as full-speed rearmament; it is twice as hard. Full mobilization would shut down vast sectors of civilian production, e.g., automobiles, automatically releasing materials, engineers, workers for defense production. Half-speed mobilization might be assumed to shut down half of the civilian automobile production, but this is far harder to do. In fact, the defense mobilizers did not even prevent retooling for new 1952 models, which would have made available men and machines for defense. In half-speed mobilization, there are no automatic surpluses of men and materials to be sopped up by arms orders.

A similar difference between all-out and half-speed mobilization exists in the armed services which order the weapons. When the economy is on all-out military production, the services know that they must set up priorities between one weapon and another. But in a half-speed mobilization, each procurement officer hopes that the material he wants can be taken out of the civilian sector of the economy, and the services do not get together on priorities. Last week, tired of waiting on the Pentagon, Wilson announced he would set up his own priority system for weapons. These difficulties will not disappear simply by deciding to have more guns, less butter.

The Long Pull. All-out mobilization, while easier, is not what the U.S. requires for the long, long arms-production pull that may be in prospect. All-out mobilization makes sense only in a general war or after a decision to go to war, whether the enemy attacks or not. The U.S. has not and will not make that decision.

As long as the enemy retains the choice of war or no-war, the U.S. is committed to a long-range armament program, which means a half-speed program.

To get up to half speed and stay there is a trick the U.S. has not mastered. Wilson & Co., the Pentagon and the Truman Administration generally seem slow to learn the techniques required for the program they have laid out.

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