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Because the U.S. holds those advantages and because Russia is so patently lacking in all but manpower reserves, Ike Eisenhower could guarantee a stalemate, at least, if war came now. Even though parts of Europe or Asia might be occupied, there is no strategic bombing force that can reach the U.S. and return—today. Meanwhile the U.S. could smack the enemy's homeland with atom bombs within 48 hours, order the Navy and Marines into action to seize advance bases from which to mount an aerial attack while the job of rebuilding the nation's war potential was begun.
Atomic attack would not necessarily be decisive. World War III, as it looks even to airmen today, would be a long, grueling battle, fought with World War II strategy and, at least at first, with World War II weapons. Soldiers argue that money and pains spent in military preparation against war prevent more disastrous expenditures to wage war itself.
Year of Crisis. U.S. military strategists know that the balance of military power is changing. They are sure they can predict almost to the year when it will have shifted to a critical degree, just as the President's civilian Advisory Commission on Universal Training forecast the situation three weeks ago.
By 1948, strategists guess, Russia will have the power to send one-way missions of 1,000 planes against the U.S. By 1949, they think, Russia will probably have guided missiles, armed with a one-ton warhead, with a range of 3,000 miles. By 1952 disease-tipped bacterial weapons may be practical. Any time after 1952, by their estimates, Russia is very likely to have the Bomb.
Over this period, the immediately ready war potential of U.S. industry and manpower will be falling. Unless the fall is checked, say the planners, 1957 will be the year of crisis, the year when Russia will first have a military edge. The question for the U.S. to ask itself is: how strong must the U.S. be in 1957?
The Braintrusters. The men who sweat for the armed forces over the answer to that question are the top crust of their profession: men like the Air Forces' Major General Lauris Norstad, the Navy's Admiral Forrest Sherman, the Army's braintruster, 39-year-old Brigadier General George A. Lincoln, head of the Army's strategy and policy team. Their answer is a whopper.
They consider the irreducible minimum to be a ready, full-strength aerial spearhead of 70 groups (some 8,000 planes) able to carry the war to the enemy's homeland, blast his cities and industry, cut up his slow-moving land armies. Behind the spearhead: eleven fully equipped combat divisions (some 132,000 men) freed from routine chores and immediately available to seize advance bases and begin the clinching land assault. The total: an Army and Air Force of 1,070,000 men, supported in flank actions by the 500,000-man Navy and Marine Corps.
To absorb the first shock of war, and to build the ready forces to full power, the planners say they need an industrial and manpower reserve which could mobilize a total of 131 air groups and 56 divisions in the first twelve months of war, 180 air groups and 74 divisions within two years.
To keep the aircraft industry alone ready for its part, that would mean an annual production of 5,700 planes (or 60 million pounds of air frame) a year.