ARMED FORCES: Sweet & Sour Notes

At Annapolis, four-star Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last week exhorted graduating midshipmen to avoid making "a fetish of tradition" and to remember always that the Navy, Army and Air Force "must think as a team, work as a team, and, when necessary, fight as a team." At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, Army Secretary Wilbur Brucker overflowed with tributes to the "magnificent Navy" and the "great Air Force with intrepid pilots." Other resonant military voices joined Brucker and Radford in three-part harmony—but they failed to drown out the dissonant undertones of continuing interservice clashes over roles and missions in the age of the missile and the atom (TIME, June 4). Among last week's sour notes:

¶In Detroit, only two days before his Arlington speech, the Army's Brucker reasserted the Army's right (bitterly disputed by the Air Force) to the long-range ballistics missile, goaded the Air Force by claiming that the Army's weapons are superior because they "are not limited in their effectiveness by fog, rain, snow or any other adverse condition." ¶ In Akron, Assistant Navy Secretary James H. Smith Jr., on the eve of an abrupt retirement to private life,*refrained from specific criticism of the other services, nonetheless ruffled Air Force feathers by assigning to the Navy a far more important strategic-bombing role than the Air Force is willing to admit. ¶ In Palo Alto, Calif., Brigadier General Carl Hutton, boss of the Army's fledgling aviation service, argued that the Army must have its own greatly strengthened air arm, sneered at the idea that the Air Force has any "divine right to a monopoly on flying machines just because they fly," derided the theory that "everything that walks belongs to the Army, that swims belongs to the Navy and that flies belongs to the Air Force." ¶ Army, an unofficial magazine that reflects high Army thinking, devoted its June issue to blasting the Air Force, suggested that the Air Force must "face up to technological obsolescence," described "conventional" Army forces as the "only reliable instrument for stopping aggression and upholding our national interests."

The continued interservice sniping made it clearer than ever that events are driving toward a unified military establishment. In that view, President Eisenhower is strongly supported by the Air Force, which has long embraced unification as part of its basic doctrine. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Thomas White was reflecting established Air Force thinking when he said in San Francisco last week: "I believe that our military services will move toward more complete unification. We need a military organization that will help us all to be free of conflicting service loyalties and confusing influences."

But the war in the Pentagon was also pushing other services along the path to unification, and even Army pointed to "the promise in this revolution by ballistic missile of greater unification and less triplification and quadruplication." Said Army: "This certainly the nation would welcome."