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Last month Harry Truman set an ultimate goal of 3,000,000 men in uniform. Just to feed, clothe, house and pay that number will cost $3 billion more than has been appropriated for such costs. By next June, said Truman, military spending will be running at the rate of $30 billion a year (v. the $25 billion appropriated so far this year); after that, he added, "we shall have to spend much more than $30 billion."
WHAT'S NEEDED NOW
How much more no one knew. But some indication was given by the estimates of Pentagon-planners a month ago of how much hardware (tanks, guns, etc.) that the U.S. must produce for itself and its allies beginning immediately. The estimates: 15,000 tanks, 25,000 pieces of artillery and 40,000 super-bazookas and recoilless rifles. This would be merely a part of a general program which would run between $35 billion and $40 billion annually for the next three years and then would taper off to a maintenance level of about $25 billion a year. But since then the Pentagon planners have been raising their goals almost every week; the talk in Washington last week was of a possible defense budget topping $50 billion a year—or more than one-fifth of the nation's total output.
The U.S. is now paying for the folly of its hasty demobilization five years ago and its refusal to start the buildup of its armed forces in 1948, as was urgently proposed by Forrestal. If the U.S. is again unwilling to meet the cost of defense—and fails again to remember the lessons of the past—then its blast in any war to come will quickly pass away.
-Last month the Government finally clamped a freeze on all its remaining surplus property, to screen it for possible use in the current rearmament program.