Expert Testimony

DEFENSE Expert Testimony

"If you will pardon me," sighed North Carolina's Democratic Senator Sam Ervin Jr. after listening to a missileman's technical talk, "it sounds like unscrewing the inscrutable." By last week Sam Ervin, Chairman Lyndon Johnson and the rest of their colleagues in the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee hearings had reason to suspect that the Pentagon, like a complex missile, needed unscrewing badly. Having taken testimony on the state of the U.S. defense posture from military and civilian defense officials as well as scientists, the committee last week sat back while the nation's top missilemakers and planemakers opened up with an unprecedented and chillingly unanimous attack on Pentagon administration. By no means, testified the missile builders, is the U.S. doing all it can to advance its missile programs; in fact, what it is doing is being slowed by red tape and multi-layered bureaucracy.

Slight, pink-cheeked Robert E. Gross, board chairman of Lockheed Aircraft Corp. (prime contractor on the Navy Polaris), registered the common complaint that Government agencies, bureaus, committees, staffs and boards interfere with quick and able decisionmaking. Contractors, he declared, are "bogged down in a labyrinth of advisers advising advisers ... We are often 'helped to death' by the hierarchy of Government agencies." Conflict-of-interest statutes defeat the Government's opportunities to hire the most able civilians for key posts. "We really cannot ask people to come down to Washington as experts for a problem as long as they have a vested interest in the very problem that they are trying to solve. This means that you get somebody to solve the problem that does not have any experience in the problem."

Cats & Guts. Even angrier was Thomas G. Lanphier Jr., wartime fighter pilot and vice president of Convair (prime contractor on the Atlas ICBM). The Pentagon, said Airman Lanphier, indulges in "dangerous semantics" by indicating that the Atlas will be reliably operational in the near future. Actually, said he, the Russians are two to three years ahead of the U.S. ICBM program because they have tested "hundreds" more parts. Convair could double its efforts on Atlas if the Pentagon so ordered, accelerate its B58 bomber program by three or four months and put 50 times as much work into its anti-missile projects.

Big, booming James H. ("Dutch") Kindelberger, board chairman of North American Aviation Inc. (rocket motors), heartily agreed with Tommy Lanphier: "I think it is going to be a long, long time before we have what I consider dependable, reliable [ballistic] missiles . . . They are intricate beyond human belief." Also beyond belief, according to Kindelberger, is the state of the Pentagon. "It reminds me," said he, "of a skein of yarn with which the cat has been playing for years. It is badly snarled and loose ends stick out all over. . . It cannot be untangled by wrapping more yarn on the outside. . . It is a big, vast, intricate thing, and I don't think you can wind another committee or another czar or another group on the outside of a tangle and straighten out the tangle."

President George Bunker of the Martin Co. (the Titan ICBM) complained that the Pentagon has "so many people who have the power of negative endorsement" but nobody to give "an absolutely clear-cut decision that you know will stand." Titan is still on a "one-shift basis" and has not received a dollar of speedup money. Curtiss-Wright's President Roy Hurley aimed at the Pentagon budgeteers who withhold money for a program that has been approved by the Joint Chiefs and authorized by Congress: "You should shoot them, or drown them or put 'em in jail." Summed up Donald W. Douglas Sr., president of Douglas Aircraft Co. (Thor): "What we need most is more guts and less gobbledygook."

Doubts & Bucks. It remained for the U.S. top military man to turn the tables and question whether alarmist testimony might not be doing U.S. defenses more harm than good. It is probably true, said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, capable, low-pressure General Nathan Farragut Twining, that the U.S. is behind Russia in long-range missiles and must "get on the move" to catch up. But "It is important that we realize, at home and abroad, that we are not--today--in my judgment, in a position of inferior military strength vis-a-vis the Soviet Union . . . Such a misapprehension could lead to fatal compromises in connection with disarmament negotiations and could lead to other retreats in the foreign policy fields--worldwide--which would eventually destroy our security."

Prodded by Missouri's Stuart Symington, onetime Air Force Secretary, on whether he thought the 1959 military budget was big enough, Air Force General Twining growled an answer that Symington should have known. Once the budget is firmly set by the executive department of the Government, said West Pointer Twining, the committee "should not bring [military men] back again and say, 'Is this still adequate?' . . . In the military terminology, a commander makes a decision, and if everybody starts bucking it, it is just no good, you have no military . . .

It puts the military man in a pretty tough seat, because. . . if he says it is inadequate, he just, I think, is approaching insubordination, and if he says it is adequate, he has more or less perjured himself . . . It is a hell of a note."

Good Soldier Twining's point reflected Dwight Eisenhower's growing irritation at admirals and generals who have used the committee's platform to sound off for favorite causes that have been overruled. But all the military discipline in Washington could not erase the shattering charge by the missilemakers themselves that the U.S. is falling far short of doing all it can in the missile program.

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