More for Less

U.S. defenses are stronger than ever, getting better all the time--and costing a little less. That was the gist of the President's special defense message to Congress. Accounting for nearly half of the U.S. budget, the defense expenditures for the fiscal year 1965 ending this June will add up to about $49 billion, a drop of some $2 billion from last year. For next year Johnson promised a further cut of $300 million.

Triple Power. Johnson duly ticked off the impressive statistics of U.S. weaponry: more than 850 land-based ICBMs, more than 300 nuclear-armed Po'aris missiles borne by submarines, more than 900 long-range SAC bombers. In the past four years, he said, ready-to-fire nuclear strategic power has tripled. Special Forces to fight "the undeclared, twilight wars of today" have expanded eightfold, troop airlift capacity has doubled.

There was nothing very new in all this. Most of the new-sounding weapons or projects cited in the message actually have been in the research and planning stage for some time and are now gradually nearing production. They include: 1) the Poseidon missile, a new name for the Polaris B-3, which will be more accurate than the present Polaris and will double its firepower to about two megatons; 2) an air-launched short-range attack missile (SRAM) with a 150-mile capability, which plugs the gap between the ten-mile Bull-Pup and the 600-mi'e Hound Dog, and will increase the effectiveness of present bombers: 3) the huge C-5A cargo aircraft capable of carrying 750 soldiers and large, fast cargo ships propelled by gas turbine engines for quicker deployment of heavy military equipment; 4) large-sca'e procurement of the controversial swept-wing F-lll (formerly TFX) fighterbombers. In purposely vague terms Johnson also forecast "remarkable new payloads for strategic missiles," including more effective devices to penetrate enemy defenses "and methods of reporting the arrival of our missiles on target."

Cautious Investment. About $6.7 billion will be spent on these and other research and development projects next year. But the Defense Department can present a slightly lower overall bill because of Secretary Robert McNamara's cost reduction program, which is saving $2.5 billion annually, and because the huge initial expenditures of deploying Minuteman, Titan and Atlas ICBMs are now past (such costs have dropped from $3.5 billion in fiscal '64 to $1.8 billion scheduled for '66). Moreover, McNamara is being cautious about the investments in really new weapons. Despite longstanding congressional demands, the defense message called for no urgent program to develop a manned bomber to follow the technologically aging B-52s and B-58s. And President Johnson again postponed a decision on whether to produce an anti-ballistic missile system, the much discussed Nike-X, which employs the high-speed Sprint missile and is designed to intercept even a saturation volley of incoming ICBMs. Engineering has progressed to the point where a final test series on the system is planned for this summer, after which the decision probably will hinge on whether Johnson feels Nike-X would be worth its cost, estimated at $20 billion.

Still, for the present, there could be little doubt that, as Johnson put it, the U.S. arsenal today is "greater than that ever assembled by any other nation and greater now than that of any combination of adversaries."

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