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SENIOR OFFICERS. As a start toward developing a body of general officers with broad, all-service loyalties, the President said that he is issuing orders that promotions above two-star ranks must be passed on by the Defense Secretary. He will consider whether candidates have demonstrated, "among other qualities, the capacity for dealing objectively—without extreme partisanship—with matters of the broadest significance to our national security." In reassigning or removing officers, the President will take undue service bias into account. This was a long step toward the Rockefeller Report's recommendation for a nonpartisan senior service (TIME, Jan. 13). Moreover, said the President, qualified technical officers and even nontechnical officers of lower rank could be shifted from service to service without forfeit of seniority, with the individuals' consent.
Toward One Service. All in all, while it studiously avoided such red-flag terms as "single service" and "general staff," the reorganization plan added up to a huge stride along the road toward unification in fact. It was so solicitous of civilian control, so careful to avoid offense to individual services, so accurately pitched to the iron logic of present-day warfare, that the enemies of unification would be hard put to destroy it. But something of a miracle would be required to prevent the independent-minded U.S. Navy and the Navy's powerful friends on Capitol Hill from closing ranks to stop it. In the end, much would depend on whether President Eisenhower was willing to fight for reorganization with the kind of "single, concentrated effort" he wants for the Pentagon.