On Target

If it should ever come to nuclear retaliation, the U.S. has to be sure that the right targets are chosen in advance, that each target is assigned to some bomber or missile force, and that striking power is not wasted through duplication. As long as the Strategic Air Command held a near monopoly on the U.S.'s long-range striking power, strategic targeting was no major Pentagon problem. But the Navy's long-range carrier bombers were hard to fit in, and the Air Force had no authority to assign targets to Navy units. The development of the Navy's new Polaris missile-submarine system makes the problem even more acute. An interservice coordinating committee, meeting twice a year to work out targeting plans, failed to solve the problem.

Last week Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates, 54, called seven top U.S. generals and admirals from command posts around the world to a meeting at the Pentagon and set forth a new plan. Gates is a normally reticent fellow who served as Under Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Navy and Deputy Secretary of Defense before taking over the top defense job late last year. He came out of the meeting calling it "my greatest decision in my eight years in the Pentagon."

His decision amounts to an imaginative compromise between what the Strategic Air Command wanted and what the Navy wanted. SAC proposed that all strategic weapons be brought under the command of SAC headquarters in Omaha. The Navy, which has to allow for its carriers and subs moving around from place to place, wanted its own target assignments to be left up to Navymen.

Under the Gates plan, strategic targeting will be worked out by a new interservice strategic planning committee, headquartered at SAC in Omaha and bossed by SAC Commander General Thomas S. Power. The committee's plans will go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have authority to order individual commanders in all three services to follow through. The new committee will keep constant check on the interlocking U.S. strategic forces scattered around the world, keep designated targets under constant cover by one force or another. Said Secretary Gates: "The big difference in the way we're doing things now and wall do them in the future is drawn by two words--coordination, as it was done, and integration, as it will be done."

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