National Affairs: THE DEFENSE BUDGET-

Vast Funds Are Spread Too Thin

MANY U.S. military men agree that $41 billion a year is enough to buy adequate defense for the nation, but few believe that the $41 billion-plus budget for fiscal 1961 is going to buy the best or even adequate defense. Though drafted over months of round-the-clock work by able planners, the proposed defense budget leaves the U.S. with cause for rising worry over how much security it gets for its tax dollar. Reason: the 1961 budget, like many of its predecessors, represents slow compromise with the fast, uncompromising changes of modern-weapons technology. Result: it spreads too thin over too many half-finished, half-good or plainly outdated programs, perpetuates costly ideas out of past wars, fails to concentrate spending upon the strict necessities of today and the future.

WASTE BY STRETCH-OUT

The new budget makes only token cuts in force levels, proposes to halt no major projects except nuclear power for aircraft carriers. The rising cost of arms is met mainly by the timeworn device of "stretching out" procurement and development schedules on hardware. The stretch-out looks fine on paper; it keeps programs alive at a reduced spending rate, preserves the same high-sounding force goals for the future—but only pushes the future farther into the future. Actually, in the day of inexorable change the stretchout wastes more money than any other budget practice. It postpones operational dates on entire weapons systems beyond the time when they are needed, or are effective, lavishes funds upon them long after obsolescence. Items:

∙The subsonic air-breathing missile was a sound concept before physicists found out how to fit a nuclear warhead into a ballistic missile. Had the Air Force's air-breathing Snark been pushed to completion on its original schedule three years ago, it could have filled a gap in U.S. air strength. By the time the first (and only) Snark wing was put into operation this year in Maine, Soviet defenses had more than caught up with it. Counting total development costs ($740 million), the Snark is one of the most costly, wings ever formed.

∙The supersonic 6-58 bomber, originally scheduled to begin operation last year, was designed to replace the obsolescent 6-47. But the newly extended stretch-out means that the $2.2 billion spent on the 6-58 may never lead to more than two or three wings, and they may be obsolescent before they are operational even in small numbers.

∙The Army's Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile, a weapons system that would cost a record $13.5 billion to become effectively operational, drags along on $300 million year-to-year handouts. Promoted by Army as a solution to the near-impossible anti-missile defense role, Nike-Zeus gets neither the funds necessary for speedup nor the kill order recommended by its critics. One factor: the Pentagon, seldom free to make decisions that are purely military, fears the panic and congressional uproar that would be set off by admission that the U.S. owns no hopeful anti-missile missile.

OVERLAP IN WEAPONS