• U.S.

National Affairs: Strategic Hitchhikers

2 minute read
TIME

The Army proudly sent around the belated birth announcements last week of an integrated 150,000-man force, set up to handle small war situations ranging from street riots to a second Korea. Name of force: Strategic Army Corps, or STRAC. Motto: Skilled, Tough. Ready Around the Clock. Composition of force: paratroops of the 82nd and 101st Airborne

Divisions, infantrymen of the 1st and 4th Divisions and the headquarters establishment of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Strike power of force: lightweight rifles, machine guns and mortars, recoilless rifles, lightweight jeeps and trucks, backstopped by air-transportable, atomic-warheaded Honest John tactical missiles.

The STRAC organization has been a loose-knit fact for nearly two years, was identified and tabbed about three months ago as the Army desperately sought a role in the strategic-deterrent concept. Already 2,000 STRAC men have been geared to a constant two-hour alert at U.S. bases; the hurry-up ”Nixon airlift” of two companies of the zoist Airborne to Puerto Rico last fortnight showed what STRAC’s advance guard could do. But the snag about STRAC as a whole is that it is dependent upon the Air Force’s inadequate force of troop-carrier aircraft to be able to fight anywhere in any strength. Within a limited war’s crucial first 36 hours, the Air Force could lift no more than one battle-ready division to the Middle East, no more than a regiment to Southeast Asia. It would take the Air Force and the Navy together several weeks to move the whole Strategic Army Corps overseas. This was why STRAC’s senior officer, Paratroop Major General Robert F. Sink, 53, last week wound up the Army’s proud announcements with a tough plea for the Army to get troop-carrier airlift of its own. Cried he: ”These divisions are a bunch of hitchhikers. If we don’t have the means of getting transportation from the Air Force or the Navy, why, we stay at home.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com