ARMED FORCES: The House of Brass

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No place in the Pentagon is more closely guarded than the Joint Chiefs' area. The original wall-boarding has been torn out and replaced with sheet steel. Somewhere in this area, its exact location secret, is the J.C.S. War Room. Entrance is through double steel doors operated by buzzers. For swift communication the Chiefs use one of the Pentagon's telecon rooms, where incoming messages are decoded and flashed on a glass screen and the outgoing replies appear on another screen beside them. Four-way conversations can thus be carried on with points as far apart as Tokyo, London and Berlin. Deep in the basement is the War Room of the Air Forces' steel-shielded command post, where nine-foot-high maps slide on tracks along the wall. Here the word of enemy attack would come, and from here the word would be flashed to the White House. Day & night a general officer is on duty in the command post, empowered to hurl the U.S. air force into action at Truman's order if an emergency demanded it.

Books & Flaps. The organization the Chiefs preside over is a world of "Standard Operating Procedure." S.O.P. is a system designed to assure that things get done, not to find better ways of doing them. Every man has a superior looking over his shoulder and the top men have Congress and the White House peering over theirs.

The Pentagonian always lives "by the book." Confronted with a problem, his instinct is to find a precedent (nothing makes a Pentagonian feel snugger than to curl up inside a precedent), to make a survey, to appoint an "ad hoc" committee, or, if possible, to hand the problem to someone else. When "the flap is on," a process which can be set off by as little as a Congressman's letter or a sudden demand from a Chief of Staff, he responds by producing a protective cloud of paper in which he can safely disappear in a smother of initials and information copies.

The run-of-the-corridor Pentagonian makes no basic decisions. He prepares the information for decision by a superior. What is more important than being right is to have thought of all the ways of being wrong. For him, no question can have only two sides. Each, like the building he works in, has at least five sides, none of which is exactly opposite the other. It is a place of the heavily guarded "yes."

The Cog. The average Pentagon officer, unless born to paper-pushing routine, is apt to be a dissatisfied man. In the brassbound Pentagon, there are more admirals than ensigns, more generals than second lieutenants. The most common rank is lieutenant colonel or (in the Navy) commander. Before he was ordered to the Pentagon, a typical lieutenant colonel might have been commanding an antiaircraft battalion in Germany, with 31 officers and 723 men under his command, along with several million dollars' worth of guns and equipment.