What Kind of War?

Britain is considering a one-third cut in its defense budget -- upwards of $1 billion a year--designed to ease the strained economy and conform to Prime Minister Eden's theories about "modern weapons" and "strategic changes in other nations." Up to now the British have viewed the next war as a trading of H-bombs followed by a "broken-backed" struggle for recovery, but they now accept the doctrine of U.S. Admiral Arthur Radford and other top British and U.S. airmen that the first big blow will settle things. The British therefore want to concentrate on guided missiles. They would abolish first the Fighter Command and then the "interim" long-range jet bombers when missiles are perfected; they would confine the Royal Navy largely to a convoy force of anti-submarine vessels, and the Land Army to a mobile ground force equipped to fight "brushfire wars."

All this, the British believe, should take about 200,000 men out of the armed forces, and perhaps end the need for conscription. As for NATO, the British would like to pull two of their four divisions out of West Germany and leave the line to a "tripwire force" adequate to flash invasion warnings to the deterrent H-bombers in Britain and the U.S. As the Manchester Guardian put it this week: "General Gruenther's screen across Europe is too weak to stop an assault by Soviet forces in East Germany, but stronger than it need be merely to act as a burglar alarm." This thinking also coincides with Radford's, but it dismays West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and NATO's retiring boss, General Alfred Gruenther. Adenauer has just bulled his own unpopular conscription bill through the German Parliament, and he let it be known at week's end that he was "extremely concerned."

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