ARMED FORCES According to Plan (See Cover)
Deep in the concrete cobweb which is the Pentagon, is a softly carpeted, closely guarded room. There, one day last week, gathered the four men charged with the defense of the U.S. against its enemies. Together they constituted the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was lanky, homely Chairman Omar Bradley, the map of Missouri on his face and the map of Europe behind him on the wall; the Air Force's handsome, greying General Hoyt Vandenberg, lounging long-legged in his leather chajr; the Army's peppery, prow-chinned General Joe Collins, who likes to do a lot of the talking. At Bradley's left sat a pink-faced man with thin hair who wears his four-star admiral's uniform with the careful air of a Sunday-best suit.
The topic laid out on the long mahogany table last week, as it had been the week before, was guided missiles—a subject which the Navy probably knows most about. The discussion was detailed and technical; it was also secret, and properly so. The man in the admiral's uniform spoke only occasionally, and then in a quiet voice, but the words were to the point, and the mind behind them forceful. Fellow members of the Joint Chiefs had learned to listen carefully to the Navy's Forrest Percival Sherman. The U.S., as the Joint Chiefs already knew, had found a fighting man of rare qualities: the man of action who is also reflective, studious, habitually unruffled.
The freshman member of the Joint Chiefs, he had stepped into his job four months ago when he became Chief of Naval Operations, in an atmosphere acrid with controversy and resentment. He had brought to the nation's highest military council something that had been too much forgotten in the jealous and unseemly interservice fights over unification—a grasp of international strategy, military history and geopolitics. He had, in fact, some of the broad-gauge character of men like Clay, Eisenhower, MacArthur—a type of mind which, on the record, West Point seemed to produce more often than Annapolis. His grasp was sorely needed, at a time when there were some who blared that nothing had changed—though an explosion, deep in the dark spaces of Russia, had wiped out the U.S.'s atomic advantage, and the loss of China had swung one-fifth of the world's population to the Soviet sphere. The fact was that in the space of eight months, the world's balance of power had shifted sharply toward the U.S.'s enemy.
It was high time for a reassessment of the nation's forces, Forrest Sherman argued, and other J.C.S. members agreed, although none could argue it with the eloquence of Navyman Sherman. Russia was spending four times as much of its income as the U.S. on armaments, already had the world's largest army and air force, was hard at work building a navy.
A reassessment, if the J.C.S. followed Sherman, and for that matter, Airman Vandenberg, would mean the end of the concept of the "balanced force"—at least insofar as it operated on the "a-pistol-for-Mole, a-pistol-for-Badger, a-pistol-for-Rat" three-way even split of the defense dollar. It would probably mean a bigger Air Force and a bigger Navy, a smaller share for the Army.