One Machine, One Purpose

While the Pentagon took to the headlines last week to air the latest and most basic power struggle among the armed forces, two leading U.S. airmen made headlines in their own right. One was General Curtis Emerson LeMay, the Air Force's Strategic Air Commander. The other was General Earle Partridge, the Air Force's Continental Air Defense Commander.

Said plain-talking Curt LeMay in testimony released by the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, chaired by Missouri's Stuart Symington: if war came today "we would do very well" and "would probably win." But by 1959 the Russians will have twice as many long-range bombers as the U.S. and will be able to destroy the U.S. by surprise attack. What LeMay wants: the world's biggest strategic striking force.

Testified "Pat" Partridge before the subcommittee: the U.S. simply does not have fighter planes that can fly high or fast enough to intercept the Soviet Union's new intercontinental jet bomber, the Bison. What Partridge wants: more and better fighter planes.

LeMay and Partridge are dedicated and intelligent officers. It is Curt LeMay's duty to fight for an absolutely unbeatable SAC, with hundreds of intercontinental bombers that can fly at twice the speed of sound at such altitude that the pilots can see the Milky Way at high noon. It is Pat Partridge's duty to strive for an absolutely impenetrable air defense screen (even if in so doing he seems to contradict LeMay's doctrine that there is no complete defense against bombers). But LeMay and Partridge are commanders with specific and therefore limited functions in a vast military machine. And it is the duty of Commander in Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower to ensure that the machine--in all its countless parts--adds up to a single unit meshed for a sole purpose: to keep war away by its total retaliatory power.

That aim no longer permits the luxury of the three services and their many sub-services wrangling for power and heading in different directions. For this reason President Eisenhower has come to one of the most important decisions of his Administration: to move for a truly unified armed service that will work in practice as well as on paper, as a single machine. Last week he ordered his White House staff planners to start work immediately on mapping out a unification plan for completion this fall. If he is reelected he hopes to present his unification proposals to Congress next year.

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