Armed Forces: Where the Other Boys Are

In all the talk about possible mobilization to meet America's needs in Viet Nam, one nagging question inevitably arises. With 3,426,680 men in uniform, why should the U.S. have to call up reserves and expand the draft in order to give General William Westmoreland the 206,000. men he wants?

The answer is that the armed forces are seriously short of riflemen. Nearly half of the nation's fighting men are in the Air Force (904,062) and Navy (748,762), and although a limited increase in the number of aircraft needed for logistical support of those 200,000 troops would be necessary, neither the Air Force nor the Navy would be sharply affected by mobilization. It is the Army (with 1,477,019 men) and the Marine Corps (296,837) that need new muscle. As of last week, both services were stretched thin, at home and abroad.

Bare Skeletons. In the continental U.S., the Army last week had 800,000 ground troops, the Marines 180,000. Only about 125,000 of the total are combat ready and capable of being deployed within or without the country on short notices for crisis duty. Key units include two brigades (8,500 men) of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division (which helped quell the Detroit riots last summer) stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., and three outfits committed to NATO exigencies: the 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions (14,500 men each) at Fort Hood, Texas, and the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, 14,300 strong at Fort Carson, Colo.

The Army is building a new infantry division, the 6th, at Fort Campbell, Ky., but its 14,000 men will not be combat ready until September. The rest of the Army's men in the U.S. are in schools or in training—many of them, ultimately, headed for Viet Nam as replacements or as part of the 18,000 more men assigned to meet the President's earlier commitment of 525,000 troops (currently only 507,000).

The Marine Corps is already extended to the leathernecked limit. In the U.S. the Marines have their 2nd Division (20,000 men), at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in combat readiness—an Atlantic reserve that must maintain seagoing battalion-landing teams with the Navy's Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, and for the Caribbean. Combat ready on the West Coast, the 28th Marine Regiment (about 5,000 men) is rattling around in California's Camp Pendleton, a bare skeleton force whose departure would empty the West of Marines.

Elsewhere in the world, the Army has five divisions (232,000 men) in Europe, two (50,000 men) in troubled South Korea. Alaska (10,000) and Panama (5,000) are the only other sizable Army commitments; the Marines also maintain an amphibious brigade of 3,000 men in Okinawa that in effect provides reserves for Viet Nam. On that bloody ground, the Army currently has 333,000 men, the Marines 83,000. Clearly, any further thinning of force strengths across the world would leave the U.S. open to possible Communist flanking thrusts—which helps to explain Lyndon Johnson's dilemma.