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The ready Air Forces, available to defend the U.S. homeland and to make a retaliatory attack, are six heavy bombardment groups and twelve fighter groups. None of them are at V-J day efficiency. The commanders who could once send 820 B-29s rumbling over Japan on a single strike, last month were able to muster only 101 for a practice raid over Manhattan. From a V-J day peak of 85,000 planes, the Air Forces are now down to 9,000 first-line aircraft, and 2,000 to 3,000 of them will pass over to reserve status each year.
Rust & Neglect. On the civilian reserve side, the National Guard program, limping, as usual, from its congenital political ailments, is also hamstrung by lack of funds. The Army Reserve program, with even less money to spend, is only a shadow of the record-line organization planned by the Army. Many of its officers, particularly airmen, are rusting from lack of training.
In the field of supply, the question of factory dispersal is still an unsolved problem. Without the stimulus of war contracts, the military aircraft industry is falling apart. The nation's plane factories, which once employed 2,101,000, can now keep only 160,000 at work. The decline is continuing. One West Coast manufacturer, now employing 16,200, expects to be down within one year to 360, all that his commercial contracts justify. The 14 major manufacturers, who built 96,000 military planes in 1944, last year built only 1,330. This year they are down to the 100-a-month level.
Stalemate. The U.S. holds three massive military advantages: the atom bomb; undisputed control of the sea; industrial power which can be turned to war with a speed and efficiency that no nation can duplicate. It also has 14 million battle-trained Army & Navy veterans; their availability for battle service will drop rapidly with the passage of time. In five years, less than half will be usable.
No longer in the hands of push-button extremists, no longer a competitive pursuit by Army, Navy and Air Forces of a will-o'-the-wisp, a research program has been coordinated under a civilian-dominated Joint Research & Development Board. By mid-1949 the board expects to have a working model of a supersonic, target-seeking antiaircraft missile (see SCIENCE), the first line of passive defense against rocket assault. Sometime after 1952 it hopes to have the ultimate in destructiveness: a supersonic missile which can be guided under full control to a target 3,000 to 5,000 miles away.
The Navy has 18 ships under construction, including some new-type high-speed submarines and the 45,000-ton battleship Kentucky, now 70% completed as a platform for launching guided missiles. At a demonstration on the West Coast last fortnight the Army & Navy showed off some new aircraft:* the rocket-propelled Bell XS-1 (TIME, Dec. 23), designed to reach a supersonic 1,000 m.p.h.; the Navy's carrier-based XFJ-1 jet fighter; Consolidated Vultee's gigantic six-motored B-36, the "Flying Cigar," which can carry a 10,000-lb. bomb load 5,000 miles and return to base; Consolidated's needle-slim XB-46, the Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing, now being adapted to jet propulsion.