Changes for the Pentagon

"We should not deliberately maintain a Department of Defense organization which, in several parts, would require drastic reorganization to fight a war," wrote departing Defense Secretary Robert Lovett to President Truman last week.

Like his predecessors in the Pentagon's hottest seat, Lovett found that most of his troubles stemmed from the "contradictions and straddles" of the 1947 National Security Act, which "unified" the armed forces in name only. The Secretary of Defense, said Lovett, should be clearly designated as the nation's deputy commander in chief. His authority over the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be sharply established by law. He should eventually get his own staff of military advisers (now forbidden by law), and all unified commands in the field should report to him rather than to the Joint Chiefs.

The institution of the Joint Chiefs of Staff itself should be revised, Lovett said. The Joint Chiefs are grievously swamped with detail and paper work, and must serve as members of the J.C.S. while they run their respective services as chiefs of staff. This duality puts them in a tough spot because they can hardly be expected, as Joint Chiefs, to vote for cuts in the services they must run as chiefs of the Army, Navy or Air Force. "This danger will exist," said Lovett, "until calculating machines replace human beings."

For a short-term remedy, Lovett would have the vice chiefs of staff run the services, saving the chiefs for review of top strategic plans and other joint decisions. For the long term, Lovett revived a recommendation which Congress has consistently turned down because of its fear of creating a U.S. equivalent to the German general staff: creation of a combined staff, composed of senior officers who have moved up from Chief of Staff, are accountable only to the President and Defense Secretary, and who are all supposedly beyond range of partisan-service ambitions.

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