Unlikely Revolution

High on the list of Jack Kennedy's campaign promises was a fresh look at the most expensive operation in the U.S. Government: the Defense Department, which devours more than half the federal budget. For a start, he asked Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington and a five-man committee of civilian experts to study ways and means of modernizing the organizational maze that winds through the Pentagon. It was a job with plenty of precedents, for critics have been suggesting revisions in the Defense Department ever since it was established in 1947.

Made public last week, Symington's report had borrowed liberally from major studies of the past, but went on to call for the most radical housecleaning ever suggested for the U.S. military establishment. Items:

P:All defense funds would be appropriated directly to the Secretary of Defense, who would have authority to spend them as he saw fit.

P:Service chiefs would report directly to the Secretary of Defense; the separate departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, with their various Secretaries, Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, would be abolished.

P:The Joint Chiefs of Staff would be replaced by a Military Advisory Council made up of senior officers who would be permanently separated from their respective services. The council would be headed by a Joint Staff Chairman, who would be principal military adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense. P:Individual services would maintain their identity but would be subordinate to three separate commands: a Strategic Command, responsible for the strategic missions of all-out nuclear war; a Tactical Command, responsible for all limited war operations; a Defense Command, responsible for all continental defense missions.

P:A fourth command, responsible for civil defense, would be composed of the National Guard and Reserve units from the separate services.

Although Symington optimistically estimated that his plan would save $8 billion, it was not likely to find many backers either in the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill. Even President Eisenhower's mod erate efforts at service reorganization, approved by Congress in 1958, have yet to be given a thorough trial, and that crusty Democrat, Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has made it clear that he thinks even the Eisenhower efforts go too far.

Even more indicative was the noncommittal comment of President-elect Jack Kennedy: "It is an interesting and constructive study, which I know will be carefully analyzed by the Congress and the incoming Administration." At week's end the word around Washington was that Kennedy had no intention of submitting any significant portion of the Symington program to Congress in 1961.

Attorney Clark M. Clifford, Kennedy's liaison man with the outgoing Eisenhower Administration; former Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter; former Air Force Under Secretary Roswell Gilpatric; Manhattan Attorney Fowler Hamilton; Marx Leva, counsel to the late Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

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