ARMED FORCES: The House of Brass

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Though the military lives by the book, the real operator is the officer who knows how to stretch the letter of the book just a bit but not too much. He is an innovator but not a rebel. The operator is the officer who wangles just a little extra, whether he is a bureau chief wangling an extra stenographer from the personnel department or Chief of Naval Operations Forrest Sherman wangling a supercarrier out of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—after his predecessor had failed and gotten fired for his pains.

The Pentagon's S.O.P., for all its shortcomings, is necessary in an organization as vast as the U.S. defense establishment. The thing works. It is designed to work despite the changing individuals who operate it, or their varying competence—whether brilliant, merely adequate or downright dumb. The Pentagon contains all three. But from its desks came the plans, and also many of the fighting men, that helped win World War II. General Matthew Ridgway was a deputy chief of staff at a Pentagon desk until called to take over the Eighth Army.

Inevitable & Durable. Good & bad, it is the military system, and the Pentagon is its shrine. At its best, it provides what Sun Tzu 2,400 years ago enjoined on commanders: "The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory and few calculations to defeat." At its worst, it suffers from the fault Napoleon pungently expressed in Maxim 65: "If a commander seeks wisdom in debates and conferences, he will arrive at the result which through all ages has followed such a course—namely, by making the worst decision, which almost always in war is the most pusillanimous, or, if you wish, the most prudent."

But in an age of complete communication, where a company commander in a Korean foxhole can theoretically pick up a field telephone and talk to Omar Bradley in his Washington office, the Pentagon is inevitable. And as long as there are modern armed forces for a Pentagon to direct, a Pentagon will exist. It will even survive an atom bomb. For the Defense Department is even now busy building another one, safely tunneled under a hill in Maryland.