THE BIG MISS IN MISSILES: Interservice Rivalry Is Costly

A WAR or two ago, the division of missions among the Army, Navy and Air Force was a matter of Biblical simplicity: the Army's domain was the land, the Navy's the sea, the Air Force's the air. Missiles upset this neat and workable pattern. To Army eyes, missiles are essentially artillery. The Air Force considers them unmanned planes. Navymen see them as modifications of carrier planes and battleship guns. Fearing loss of missions, prestige and even existence, the three services have scrambled fiercely for shares of the missile field. Result: three missile programs that duplicate and even triplicate each other's hardware, compete for scientific brainpower and even keep technological secrets from each other.

Birds of a Feather

With the services competing hotly, the U.S. had upwards of 40 assorted missiles under development by 1950, when Defense Secretary George Catlett Marshall called in Chrysler Corp.'s gruff President K. T. Keller to bring order out of the chaos. Despite service wails and groans, Keller canceled more than half the missile projects. But after he left the Pentagon in 1953, no overall missile boss with equal authority and toughness succeeded him, and the services promptly started backsliding into uncurbed competition.

Today, the U.S. again has 40-odd missiles in operation or under development, and some of them are birds of a feather, e.g., the Navy's air-to-air Sidewinder and the Air Force's Falcon. The University of Buffalo's Chancellor Clifford C. Furnas, onetime (December 1955-February 1957) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development, recalls that it was all but impossible to get the Navy and Air Force to work together on a single 500-mile-range, subsonic, surface-to-surface missile: "As a consequence, we have two such missiles−the Air Force's Matador and the Navy's Regulus." Cost of developing Matador and Regulus, with practically the same range, speed and bang: $200 million apiece.

Thor V. Jupiter

Last November, as a curb on interservice missile rivalry, Defense Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson issued a firm order limiting the Army to ranges of 100 miles for ground-to-air (antiaircraft) missiles and 200 miles for ground-to-ground (artillery) missiles. The Army went on developing an intermediate range (1,500 miles) ballistic missile in hope that the Army's missile mission would be broadened later on. Result: continued costly rivalry between the Air Force's Thor and its Army cousin Jupiter.