DEFENSE: Ideas Under the Ceiling

If set too low, a strict ceiling on military spending could disastrously weaken the nation's defenses. But a ceiling that is merely uncomfortable can have beneficial results: it can force military leaders to cut down on overlap, make choices between concepts and weapons. Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, backed up by the President, has tried to hold the 1960 defense budget to a distinctly uncomfortable $41.6 billion, i.e., this year's level plus a 2% inflation factor. And one result of the painful ceiling is that the Pentagon is taking hard-eyed looks at duplication and obsolescence among the U.S.'s twoscore missile programs.

The Air Force announced last week that it is canceling its air-to-ground missile Rascal, now surpassed by the longer-range Hound Dog. Due soon, on orders from the President, is an appallingly long-delayed decision between the rival liquid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the Air Force's Thor and the Army's Jupiter. Last week's splendid 6,300-mile performance by Atlas may also firm a tentative decision to slow down on or drop the Air Force's alternative intercontinental ballistic missile Titan. Also to be cut back or discarded: the Navy's unreliable Vanguard, the Army's reliable but bulky Redstone.

But the big decisions that budget-making forces upon military leaders are not choices between similar weapons but choices between radically differing weapons, differing concepts. This year more than in any year since the New Look ferment of 1953, fresh concepts are shaping the defense budget. Among them:

Leaping a Generation. Nagging the Air Force is a vast and worsening aircraft and missile obsolescence problem. Today the heavy-wallop weapons are the B-52 and B-47. Around the corner is a new generation: the B58 bomber, Atlas, Titan. But a few years beyond these, the Air Force sees a radically different weapons system of Minuteman solid-fuel missiles, ready for rapid launching from invulnerable underground nests (TIME, March 10). Under the pressure of the budget ceiling, Air Force brains are asking: Why sink most of our development and procurement funds over the next few years into B-58s and liquid-fuel ICBMs that will become obsolete as the Minuteman system builds up? Why not divert some of that money into speeding up Minuteman? With that idea in mind, the Air Force wants to spend more than ten times as much on Minuteman in 1960 as it is spending this year—$250 million v. $22 million. B58 procurement will probably slow down; the Titan program may shrink drastically.

Downgrading the IRBM. With NATO allies except Britain and Italy showing scant enthusiasm for U.S.-offered intermediate-range missiles, the Pentagon is reappraising the worth of the IRBM, designed for launching from overseas sites, as against the intercontinental missile, designed for launching from U.S. bases. Trend: more reliance on ICBMs, less on IRBMs, which would be of little use in a limited war and would be vulnerable to Russian attacks on overseas bases in an all-out war.