The Expert's Touch

In most respects, the President's plan for reorganization of the U.S. defense establishment followed the recommendations of Nelson Rockefeller's three-month-old Committee on Department of Defense Organization.* But it also reflected a sureness of touch based on the President's intimate knowledge of the nation's military machine and its shortcomings. "I address the Congress," noted Eisenhower last week, "on a subject which has been of primary interest to me throughout all the years of my adult life . . ."

The new plan had three major objectives: more efficiency, improved strategic planning and greater civilian control. To achieve those objectives, said Ike, the following changes are necessary:

P: Transfer of management of the Joint Staff, an important working-level panel of about 200 top officers, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a body to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs alone. End result: substantial increase in the authority of the chairman, at the expense of the other members of the J.C.S. (a move certain to provoke a storm from service partisans who fear steps toward unification).

P: Abolition of three "slow and clumsy tools"--the Munitions Board, the Research & Development Board and the Defense Supply Management Agency. To take over their functions as well as those of other boards, committees and advisers, the President recommended the creation of six new Assistant Secretaries of Defense. Result: strengthened control for the Secretary of Defense--and. incidentally, elimination of about 500 Defense Department employees.

P:Transfer of executive responsibility for a unified, multiservice command from one of the Joint Chiefs (e.g., Korea under Army General J. Lawton Collins. Alaska under Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg) to a civilian service secretary. Result: more civilian control, and a further confinement of the Joint Chiefs to their role of "military advisers."

P:Affirmation of the authority of the Secretary of Defense to delegate his functions as he sees fit, to insure flexible administration, capable of decentralization.

Both in & out of the Pentagon, Washington has been talking of the need for revision of the 1947 National Security Act ever since it was last patched by Congress nearly four years ago. But even the most ardent advocates of revision hesitated to throw debate open for the pulling and hauling of the individual services and their congressional spokesmen. Eisenhower's decision to present his proposals in the form of a "reorganization plan" was perhaps his happiest stroke, since a reorganization plan 1) cannot be amended by Congress, 2) is not likely to involve committee hearings, and 3) automatically becomes law unless the House or Senate rejects it within 60 days.

-The members: General Omar Bradley, Scientist Vannevar Bush, President Milton S. Eisenhower of Penn State College, Office of Defense Mobilization Chief Arthur Flemming, former Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, RCA Board Chairman David Sarnoff.

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