DEFENSE: Shots from the Hip

In all its proud history, the U.S. Army has suffered no more galling defeats than it did on the nation's peacetime rocket ranges after World War II. With a group of ex-Nazi rocketmen as its nucleus (Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus), the Army bled its budget to set up in the missile business—and, in fact, saved the nation's face by launching the first U.S. satellite after Sputnik. But the Defense Department ruled that long-range rocketing was properly the role for the Air Force, and the Army's Redstone Arsenal was turned over to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

One after another, as frustrated Army careermen took off their uniforms and left the service, they found relief at a typewriter, rattled off angry books about Defense Department policies. Latest to step to the literary firing line: Major General John Bruce Medaris, 58, former chief of the Army Ordnance Missile Command, who retired last January.

In Countdown for Decision (Putnam; $5), Missileman Medaris (who quit the Army for a while to try his hand at business before World War II) shoots from the hip at targets all along the Potomac. Among them:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff: Their inability to agree "removes the professional military experts from any effective role in the decision process." Command of the armed services goes by default to "a combination of short-tenure appointed civilian secretaries supported by permanent, professionally unprepared, civil service civilians." (Medaris' extravagant exception: Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, a staunch defender of the Army missile program, "one of the best, if not the best Secretary of the Army ever.")

The Air Force: "Lack of a sound, experienced military-technical organization has been responsible for the technical side of that service becoming almost a slave of the aircraft and associated industries, subject to endless pressure and propaganda ... As an absolute minimum the Army and Air Force must be recombined into a single service."

Businessmen in Government: Because the big businessman has succeeded in his own field, he has the illusion that he knows all the answers when appointed to a job in the Defense Department. "He rarely does." Civil Defense: "The concept of mass evacuation of high-density population centers and the burial of our citizenry in deep shelters would negate any kind of positive reaction to attack. It would convert our people into a horde of rabbits scurrying for warrens where they would cower helplessly while waiting the coming of a conqueror."

ICBMs: "Three separate systems—Atlas, Titan and Minuteman (and now Titan II)—are simply too many. The fear engendered by Soviet rockets has destroyed prudent judgment. We seem to be preparing not for retaliation but for obliteration."

Polaris Missile: "Personally, I consider the Navy's Polaris system the best bet for the retaliatory striking power for the near future. It offers the advantage of concealment to a much more realistic degree than the entombment of concrete-protected, land-based missiles."