THE BIG MISS IN MISSILES: Interservice Rivalry Is Costly

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To settle on an IRBM to go into assembly-line production, Wilson set up a nicely balanced committee made up of Air Force Major General Ben Schriever, Army Major General John Medaris and Wilson's special missiles assistant, William Holaday. The problem was urgent. With IRBM production soon to be vital for NATO defense, and with Russia apparently well along in IRBM development, the President and the National Security Council had tagged the IRBM program with top priority. But the problem was also agonizingly tough. The Thor-Jupiter committee started meditating last August, but one of the first decisions announced by Defense Secretary Neil McElroy when he took over from Wilson a fortnight ago was a postponement of the final decision. The committee had reported that it needed data from additional test firings of each missile to come up with a sound answer (each has been fired about half a dozen times so far). Cost of an IRBM test firing: $6,000,000.

Third IRBM

Meanwhile, the Navy has gone on developing its own IRBM to be launched from submarines or surface ships. Weighing only one-third as much as Thor or Jupiter, and burning easier-to-handle solid fuel instead of liquid, the Navy's Polaris promises to be a more efficient all-round IRBM than either of its rivals. If it were as far along in development as Thor and Jupiter, a case could be argued for making it the nation's production-line IRBM.

Viewed in one light, the Navy's development of Polaris proves the often-raised point that service rivalry can be a valuable spur to research; viewed in another, it proves that if the best plans of each service were pooled to begin with, the U.S. might have better missiles in production sooner. If supplies of money, scientific and engineering brainpower and research facilities were unlimited, the ideal missile program for the U.S. might indeed be to let all three services go on developing complete missile inventories. But with resources tightly limited, the U.S. cannot afford to let competition sprawl into scatteration and wasteful overlapping. In the post-Sputnik crisis, continuation of interservice rivalry can only be regarded as the easy way out. Some hard decisions must be made, and they must be made in the Pentagon and the White House.