Charlie's Hurricane

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The troops marched smartly down Washington's Constitution Avenue, the jets streaked overhead, and on the reviewing stand Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson held himself bulkily erect. Unknown to Wilson, the telephone even then was buzzing in his Sheraton-Park apartment 700G. Capital newsmen wanted to speak to him. The review over, the pleased and proud Defense Secretary drove to the plane that would take him to Virginia's Hot Springs for the weekend. But at the National Airport newsmen swarmed over him with stinging questions. Wilson turned to an aide, said reproachfully: "I thought you told me there wasn't anything hot going on." It was a brilliant, cloudless Armed Forces Day 1956—a day set aside for the services to parade their unity across the U.S.—and around Charlie Wilson's shaggy head had broken a storm of military disunity.

The U.S. Army, long bubbling with discontent, had boiled over with scalding anti-Air Force documents slipped to friendly reporters (TIME, May 28). The Air Force struck back with its own propaganda bombs, and some of them indiscriminately clobbered the Navy as well as the Army. Back from Hot Springs, a few days too late, Charlie Wilson labored mightily to bring peace to the Pentagon, but by this week the battle had qualities of nightmare. On one occasion, for example, Air Force officers disguised themselves in their old Army uniforms and strolled innocently through the Pentagon's Army sections to see what they could spy out. In his home near the Pentagon, an Army colonel denied with outraged innocence the suggestion that he had passed out any of the hot documents—and promptly proceeded to hand a reporter two of them (including one titled The Facts Versus Billy Mitchell).

Unthinkable War. Behind such pot-shooting lay the basis for a deadly serious war between the services. In the years since World War II, the growing potential of the atom has brought new importance to air power because air power is the prime delivery means for A-bombs and H-bombs. The atom knocked askew the comfortable old U.S. military idea of balanced forces. President Eisenhower wrenched the Air Force, Navy, Army roles and missions even more sharply by ruling that the atomic bomb should be the primary weapon both for retaliation in case of a big war, or for retaliation (on enemy supply bases, training areas, etc.) in a small war. Next, the guided missile whistled into the everyday language and planning of warfare; with it came the prospect of technological unemployment—and reduced funds—for the parts of the armed services functionally tied up with the old concepts.

In this new world of hydrogen bomb plus missile, the President had come to a further basic and revolutionary conclusion: modern war is unthinkable and must not be allowed to happen. The way to prevent it is to shape the U.S. armed forces so that they can clearly strike back instantly and devastatingly at any aggressor, thus make him realize that if he begins a war, it will be concluded—as Air-Power Man Curtis LeMay says—without "profit" to himself. Therefore, for the first time in military annals, the primary mission of the U.S. armed forces is not to prepare and plan for long war, but to array themselves as a powerfully armed, well-deployed ready instrument of deterrence.