ARMED FORCES: Man Behind the Power

(8 of 9)

NAVY. "The Navy," says Admiral Radford, "is a precision instrument of diplomacy. Foreigners apprehend the punitive possibilities of a ship which can pinpoint a target without sounding the signal for another world war." From the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, the versatile Navy can land Marines to pacify a mob, put down missiles within a 500-mile range, send A3D twin-jet bombers at 600-plus m.p.h. to a radius of 1,500 miles. Most pressing day-by-day Navy job: watching for deployment of Russian guided-missile and conventional submarines against U.S. coastal cities and overconcentrated U.S. Navy bases like Norfolk-Newport News.

The Navy is pressing its hunter-killer submarine measures, e.g., extremely long-range detection, atomic depth charges. It will build its 15th atomic submarine; it wants to build 15 atomic aircraft carriers (at $310 million each), and Nautilus, symbol of Admiral Arleigh Burke's atomic revolution (TIME, May 21), has already and without refueling sailed 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.

ARMY. Still basically a road-bound and land-chained World War II-Korea concern, outnumbered 175 divisions to 18 by Russia's manpower (let alone Red China's). As of now, the Army's most useful deterrent service is to hold the line in Germany and Korea in such strength that the Communists must concentrate to break through, thus provide targets for U.S. atom power (so plentiful is the atom that one Red battalion is now a suitable atomic target).

But the Army, says Admiral Radford, "never had a brighter future." Building on the morale of its elite and tradition conscious troops ("Airborne, airborne all the way" shouts the 82nd Airborne trooper), the Army is developing: 1) atomic support commands with Corporal and Honest John atomic-missile batteries packing the firepower punch of all the U.S. artillery of World War II; 2) lightweight "pentomic" divisions comprising five mobile combat groups well suited to fight a dispersed and radioactive war. Because the U.S. is short on military transport, it would have taken 30 days to airlift one Army division to Suez.

No Time for Bickering. Radford, who considers these the most powerful forces in the history of the world, well knows the problems of keeping them that way. Problem No. 1 is that a high percentage of the services' skilled technicians are leaving for higher wages in industry. Radford and the service Chiefs are convinced that the answer is to make service life fairly competitive with civilian life, e.g., higher pay for higher skills and higher merits, and they argue forcefully that the higher costs (perhaps an additional $700 million a year) will be more than met by higher re-enlistment and higher performance.

Problem No. 2 is that the U.S. is now beginning to move into "the grey area." in which the unknowns of ballistic missiles must be phased gradually into the knowns of planes and men, with the prospect of heavy damage to such key sections of the military economy as the fighter aircraft airframe industry (see BUSINESS).