OPINION: Atom-Age Army

"I am not going out to write and raise a rumpus and things," said Lieut. General James M. ("Slim Jim") Gavin, 50, Army Research and Development chief, when he announced his retirement from the service seven months ago, after losing his battle to get a healthy boost in his 1959 budget (TIME, Jan. 13). This week LIFE published the second of two installments on Gavin's quickly written 304-page book, War and Peace in the Space Age (Harper; $5), a rumpus-raising attack on his old enemies and a sharp accusation that the Army is in bad shape technologically because the defense effort has been too concentrated on the Air Force. And this, he says, is doubly tragic, because: 1) limited wars using tactical atomic weapons are still more likely than the massive air-atomic one for which the Strategic Air Command is ready, and 2) SAC's big bombers will be useless in the missile age that is almost upon the world.

The manned atomic bomber, declares Paratrooper Gavin, will be out of business even before the intercontinental ballistic missile is on hand to replace it. Date for the bomber's "early obsolescence": the moment effective Russian "surface-to-air missiles carrying nuclear warheads are on the site in numbers." If such deterrent protection is to be retained, argues Gavin, "we will have to step up missile production so as to have, at an early date, an arsenal of combat-ready, mobile, intermediate and long-range missile systems."

Other targets at which Gavin fires:

EX-DEFENSE SECRETARY CHARLES E. WILSON. Gavin quotes an unnamed service chief on Wilson: "The most uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so." His "deception and duplicity," says Gavin, let him conceal slashes in combat-ready divisions by creating "Wilson" divisions out of paper groups of troops as far apart as Fort Benning, Ga. and the Panama Canal Zone. Wilson made good a foolish assurance to Congress that no additional soldiers were needed for Formosan defense, charges Gavin, by shipping groups over without shoulder patches.*

U.S. INDUSTRY. Industrial pressure, he charges, is partly responsible for "hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on obsolete weapons."

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT. The Defense Department civil servants who, more permanent in the Pentagon than either politically appointed Secretaries or rotated military career officers, pervert the decision-making machinery. Though he does not name Defense Comptroller Wilfred J. McNeil, Gavin bombs the fiscal officer in the Pentagon who often rejects projects without understanding of military needs.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower was "out of touch" with technological advances in weaponry, says Gavin, as far back as SHAPE days.