ARMED FORCES: Restrained Power

(See Cover)

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.

—Alfred Thayer Mahan

Neatly spaced amid the welter of bulldozers, cranes and sweating U.S. marines on Yellow Beach north of Beirut, Lebanon last week stood five green and white umbrellas boldly emblazoned SEVEN-UP. The umbrellas each sheltered a friendly Lebanese vendor with an iced soft-drink box packed with Seven-Up. They were spaced with such orderly precision because the marines' beachmaster decided in his second week ashore that the hordes of Lebanese pop salesmen needed as much organization as the unloading of supplies into that precise point of the crisis-torn Middle East.

Under gnarled old trees in a quiet olive grove on the inland side of Beirut's strategic International Airport, officers of the U.S. Army's 187th Airborne Battle Group were working on a battle plan. They were ready, if called upon, to roll up the Basta, a Moslem area of Beirut held by Nasserite rebels, sealed by deep tank traps, banked with sandbags, defended by carefully sited automatic weapons. But there were immediate problems in the olive grove. Inevitably, the trucks and heavy combat vehicles of the 187th were barging into some of the olive trees causing damage, and there was the question of compensation for the Lebanese olive growers. Mutually satisfactory method of compensation : count the olives on each ruined tree; figure out the estimated life of the tree; pay out the estimated lifetime revenue of the tree, up to 100 years.

To the west of the beach, aboard the mighty 60,000-ton supercarrier Saratoga, pride of the Sixth Fleet, the Navy's job for the day was to pound Douglas AD Skyraider bombers and Chance Vought F8U1 Crusader fighters out of steam catapults into a Mediterranean haze amid jet engine roars, catapult cracks, clouds of hissing white steam. The mission: to show the silver of Navy air power over Lebanon. But Saratoga's jet pilots, like all Navy pilots off Lebanon, got word to steer clear of a certain point just south of the predominantly Moslem port of Tripoli. Reason: a Nasserite rebel sniper holed up there had scored so many hits on Navy planes with .30-and .50-cal. ammunition that Navy pilots were calling him "Annie Oakley." Navy orders: "Don't shoot back." What if Navy planes got shot down? Said a Sixth Fleet air officer: "I guess we would order them to fly higher."

The officer with the job of welding marines, paratroops, Navymen into a spear-point of U.S. diplomacy in one of the U.S.'s weirdest-ever military missions: the Navy's four-star Admiral James Lemuel Holloway Jr., 60. CINCNELM, Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean; CINCSPECOMME, Commander in Chief, Specified Command, Middle East. Said he: "One might think it would be frustrating to a military man to have such a role—lacking vigorous military action—but I do not think so. The U.S. responded to a request for assistance from the legal government of Lebanon. Our main purpose right now is simply to be here. We are playing from great strength but with great restraint."